Hacker News Reader

Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone(PG?) comment what's the point of non-disclosing e.g. how that search ordering is calculated?

Or any other aspect of this site (if there are any other)...

So far, it looks to me like the secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

I'd offer a comparison to my behaviour on Yahoo! Answers, where they clearly laid out the permissions attached to the various levels (http://answers.yahoo.com/info/scoring_system), and as such I only actively engaged on the site until I achieved the level I wanted.

By not disclosing the values, we don't have goals to hit. And without those tangible goals, we're forced to focus on the journey rather than the destination.

There have been (still are?) aggressive voting rings active on HN. These rings are harmful to the site, artificially raising stories.

There are people who's only involvement in the site is to submit articles that they have written on their blog.

Not disclosing how the site works makes it a bit harder for those people to game HN.

Maybe it is hidden deep in the source code (https://github.com/wting/hackernews), the problem is that Arc is basically unreadable if you're used to stuff like C/C++/Java/PHP/Assembler.

Is that the latest source? I didn't realise it was available but when searching HN before posting the topic I did find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964 ("Tell HN: How to find karma thresholds in the HN source code") so perhaps if things haven't changed much in the intervening 1298 days it'll still work.

It might be the meat of it, but IIRC pg has said that he tweaks key algorithms like comment ranking on his own.

The core concepts are in the Arc source code (which I can read, with effort, even though I'm not a programmer, because it is well commented) but as another reply has already correctly pointed out, some of the current implementation on Hacker News includes "secret sauce" algorithms that don't appear to have any public documentation. The ongoing effort here

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

is "making a conscious effort to resist decline," so that participants "don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

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