Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaunpersad | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page.

Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

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I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic.

Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.

This only works if your sample space is small, whereas I'd argue the range of topics that can show up on Hacker News is nothing but ;)

I agree, but the range of topics which may be popular at any given time is narrower and two stories about a single topic are likely to trend at similar times shrinking the sample space somewhat.

We call those copycat or follow-up posts and mostly downweight them, on the grounds that predictability makes HN less interesting.

If it's just the same theme, and not just another page on the same thing, why not encourage it instead?

Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf

Because front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, and there's more information in 30 distinct stories.

The natural place for follow-up links is, of course, the original thread.

Very often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.

Also often links that get mentioned in the comments of the original one.

That's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.

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