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Comment by markmccraw | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious whether these numbers factor in people who are looking for you/interacting with your profile. My list has some people I don't recognize as well people who I definitely have not clicked anything of recently, which is why it might.

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Well I changed my privacy settings to visible to all, made a dummy account and click raped my profile and my dummy account didn't show up. I'll add the accounts as friends and then make note of the number, then do clicking from the dummy and see if it changes. There could be some privacy implications behind the initial coolness of this.

Also, if you make an account and do nothing your value for yourself is 0.939565, which I guess is some sort of baseline of 0 interaction? Although I don't understand how they are modeling your interaction with yourself, tbh.

It seems like there is a lag time between clicking stuff and the value changing, because I'm not getting my dummy to show up at all.

The bottom half of my list consists entirely of people who I didn't recognize at all. All but one of the ones I looked at have at least one mutual friend with me. (Now I'm curious whether Facebook generates some of these entries just by crawling my social graph?)

Also, can anyone share what range of numbers they're seeing? At the very top of my list is one negative number. Beyond that, the top half of my list ranges between 0.1 and 1.0. The last half of the list ranges from 1.0 to 1.2.

Top of my list is -3.7312181, bottom is 1.237559. 11 negative numbers, 108 positive. A friends was skewed more to negative numbers, so I'm guessing that maybe you just aren't a heavy/frequent user?

You guessed it. :-)

I also thought that other people's interactions with me are a part of the algorithm for this same reason. However, the reply by Keith Adams seems to suggest that is not the case, and that they are just "machine generated guesses" which weigh into the algorithm.

Part of the algorithm may involve them trying to predict who you will want to add as a friend. People that attended the same events as you, people who have recently added your friends as friends, stuff like that.

I am wondering this too, there are many people in that list which I am not friends with and have only visited their profile once, yet they have a higher score than some of my really close friends.

The score is probably a measure of mutual information (or some other kind of log prob). That's what usually produces scores distributed like this.

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