I think I found a secret link on HN to the best stories of recent time (can't find a link to it from anywhere) | Hacker News Reader

I think I found a secret link on HN to the best stories of recent time (can't find a link to it from anywhere)

news.ycombinator.com

51 pointspkrumins20 comments

Open articleView on HN

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

check the source for more goodies, but keep in mind that the performance impact of some of these may not be all that nice, which may be why they are not linked from the menu bar.

By looking over the "best" stories and "best comments", I find it interesting to note that very few of these are anywhere near what I'd consider to be the "best" of Hacker News.

Of course, we shouldn't take high karma to mean "good" any more than we take "popular" to mean good in social contexts, but I think it's telling that pg, amongst most commenters here still conflate the two, and while I'm sure most people here, when pressed, would say that they know this isn't really the best of HN, we see people optimize for high karma all the time, often at the expense of actual good content.

It's unfortunate that we're using a rating system that encourages this behavior.

I wonder if the comments follows a Power Law (80/20 rule), or if there is a linear increase from 0 to about 100 karma points. Is there any way we could get the data and graph that?

Here is the data for some stories on HN:

-8, 8 -7, 4 -6, 9 -5, 4 -4, 2 -3, 7 -2, 9 -1, 12 0, 26 1, 656 2, 385 3, 243 4, 182 5, 133 6, 76 7, 51 8, 37 9, 38 10, 32 11, 19 12, 21 13, 15 14, 24 15, 13 16, 16 17, 10 18, 10 19, 9 20, 10 21, 4 22, 12 23, 3 24, 3 25, 6 26, 1 27, 7 29, 2 31, 3 32, 1 33, 1 34, 1 35, 4 36, 3 38, 1 39, 1 40, 2 47, 1 48, 1 49, 1 51, 2 58, 3 64, 1 90, 1 98, 1

have fun with the graphing :)

on the hn homepage, there is a link "lists" that has these

Yup. Yahoo found it http://ca.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/siteexplorer/search?...

http://top.searchyc.com/ for the top stories and comments of all time

I was just thinking of writing a small search tool that would search in YC HN...

But you provided this nice link.

Hacking the hacker news! That's the way it should be... :-)

I saw http://news.ycombinator.com/x in my referer logs, what is this for? When I clicked on it, it said: Unknown or expired link, like if you leave the add comment window open too long.

It looks like it is only sorting the last week's stories by karma, not every story in HN history. Which begs the question: is there a way to see every story by karma?

That's not what "begs the question" means.

The phrase you want is "suggests the question".

"Begs the question" means "a circular argument".

Interesting, thanks for the correction. I've been using that wrong for quite some time. There's even a whole Wikipedia article devoted to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

"Raises the question" also works (although suggests is certainly more correct).

Cool! Now who want's to write a HN fuzzer? Bonus points if you write it in Arc...

You mean, something that would try random inputs and URLs to the spidered site map of Hacker News? That tool already exists, in many forms.

Thanks to the site's growth, almost all of them are fairly recent. I suppose that's a good way to tell how the traffic is doing here.

The list only considers the last 10000 item ids.

Although it is a sign of growth that 10k item ids used to be a window of about 6 weeks, and now it seems to be more like 10 days.

Nice... good find.

It appears to go back a week and a half or so.

I'm not sure how useful it is, but still a nice find :-)

its been there awhile...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362240 from 98 days ago refers to it.

I also saw a recent comment by pg about 2 weeks ago that referred to it, which is how I learned of its existence.

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