Profit per Employee at Tech Companies Compared to Other Industries

I came to the comments just to see what was the reaction to this article which was up early in the morning and still is on the front page a few hours later, even though there's not much content to it.

I'm glad you keep an eye on these.

I think new users are especially inclined to vote up headlines related to previously popular articles, regardless of the new article's standalone value. They may think it contributes to the discussion and deserves the same attention. Then suddenly one topic dominates the top slots and most links are junk.

Usually, the new article is a hurried blog post that links back to the old, popular one, often in the first paragraph. One rudimentary way to stop this behavior would be to check if the new article contains a very recently popular link.

I'm glad to see you point this out. When I try to point it out I get -5 karma.

Hi Paul,

I apologize for submitting this article. If it is viewed by the community as sub-par or unworthy please know it was unintentional. My thought was that this take on the article helped put the numbers into perspective relative to other classes of trade. It probably would have made a better comment than submission.

I have a huge respect for what has been created at HN and though my account is less than a year old I've been reading for far longer.

Two thoughts on things that could be done other than weighting (which I'm actually a fan of).

1. I would make this guideline a bit more explicit "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. -- Reference replies to the primary source in comments unless the analysis is equal to or greater in quality than the original"

2. Create a 2 column approach for comments with "new" on the right and sequential, or popular on the left. This would help some comments get a fair hearing in heavily threaded stories.

However neither suggestion will take the place of a strong community. Thanks for calling me out.

Isn't that what vote weighting is for?

This was an interesting followup to the tech company rankings -- but doesn't itself have the weight to justify high billing. Perhaps posting such followup links in comments to the original story could be given higher (or folded-under) placement -- keeping the topics together, giving the original story a greater lifetime, reducing clutter, unifying discussion. (That is, posters or editors could fold stories into existing threads.)

Also: can we get comments ranked in classic fashion? Or maybe display two numbers for a comment's score: all/classic? I think I'm seeing more cases where the absolute sign of the score would be different for early-vs.-recent voters.

Is there any feedback to the submitter why a story is deleted? I've had a couple of stories deleted, one yesterday. Sometimes it's obvious, but this one wasn't to me. Having said that, I'm still in favor of more aggressive pruning.

Edit: I'll take that back. It disappeared because nobody cared. :-( Lesson to me.

Does the specific rankings matter? I'd thought the only metric that matters is on/off frontpage.

My assumption(perhaps woefully assuming) is that people scan the front page for new/interesting titles and read them. Not that they think "Oh, I'm not reading that it's only at #13, maybe when it breaks into the top-ten."

Why don't you allow down voting of articles?

What about only counting "orange" users for the frontpage?

This seemed a very strong measure of user quality, and it was only reverted because of social effects - which wouldn't be present for frontpage votes. It might also give evidence of whether it really is a strong measure of user quality or not.