Hacker News Front Page Ranking Algorithm (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Front Page Ranking Algorithm (2008)

github.com

That's from 2009 and also excludes a lot of the "secret sauce". I reverse-engineered the algorithm in 2013 [1], but things have changed a lot since then.

[1] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

This should have (2009) appended to the title. I imagine that the code for this site has changed a great deal in the last eleven years.

I’ve tried to verify the algorithm in the past but the api doesn’t expose enough information to do so. You would need to be able to see points on the comments, where currently you can only see the points on the comments you made. If I remember correctly the reputation of the voters at the time they voted is also a factor. I completely understand why this isn’t available but if your just really curious how the greatest site around works you reach a dead end there.

It can be really facisnating to see the magic numbers and transformations people come up with.

The actual algorithm should probably stay secret to prevent manipulation of Hacker News. But, details would be useful to others building similar social networks around other principles.

Is this the actual HN ranking code? It looks like a demo of a lisp.

Hacker News literally is (or began as) pg's demo of Arc Lisp.

But Anarki no longer resembles what's running on HN currently.

Never knew! Thank you. Do you know if the current algorithm is published anywhere or do they keep that under wraps to prevent it from being gamed?

I think dang has mentioned they might consider publishing some of the changes they've made over the years but that it would be difficult to untangle the YC business logic from everything else, and they wouldn't have the time to maintain it.

But anything to do with voting, spam detection, ranking etc. though, they definitely keep secret.

HN runs an evolved version of said "demo of a lisp". So it's probably not the actual code running anymore, but it is a predecessor.

dang has mentioned several times the algorithm has evolved over the years.

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