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For those who aren't well versed in Arc or Lisp, could someone go through the differences?

Appears to be substantially identical to what's outlined in the post. The only changes are in the penalties dealt out by the type of story, inclusion of a url, buried status, gagged status, and the operation of penalties due to the contro(versial?)-factor function.

If you're just submitting interesting URLs and worry about them being shunted off the main page by gravity then there are no practical differences.

The gag tag doesn't mean "gagged." It means the post is a gag, in the sense of a joke.

Sorry I can't be more transparent about how contro-factor is calculated, incidentally. Its purpose is to recognize flamewars.

I'm curious about how you evaluate prospective algorithm changes. Do you roll out a change you think should work and then monitor, or do you have a corpus of e.g. flame wars you test against?

There's a repl on the server, and I test tweaks on the live site.

Do you have a dashboard of some kind to visualize your tests effects? I am curious about the broad kind of insight one could have with such a programmatic access to this community. Perhaps I missed an essay about HN/REPL?

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