Hacker News: Best | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News: Best

news.ycombinator.com

204 pointszainny48 comments

In case anyone is wondering, what motivated me to submit this was simply the fact that while I've known about this section forever, a quick poll of people I know who visit HN revealed that it wasn't common knowledge.

I have no idea why this and other sections (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) aren't linked from the main page in a prominent visible manner - especially /best which is great for people like me who check in every few days.

Thank you. I've never heard of that either

Thanks for pointing this out. I never knew about Best and Lists. :)

I used to go to http://hckrnews.com to get a similar list, but this seems to use a different algorithm.

I haven't been to the Hacker News homepage for a long time since using hckrnews. Its such a nice way to get a quick overview of the day.

It's the first link in the footer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders is another fun page that used to be on the header a couple of years ago.

Also, I have a simple site that tries to take a snapshot of the HN front page every hour so that I can catch up if I'm away for a few days: http://hackerslide.com/

Oh cool! I'm on HN pretty constantly and a quick slide showed me that I'm not on quite as always as I thought.

Nice idea.

Neat - I completely forgot about this. If anyone's interested in these different views on top of HN I created http://yahnr.com/ a while ago that just shows the top stories by vote from the past 24 hours, updated every 15 minutes.

I mostly did it as a way to generate a "pseudo-static" site that is entirely hosted on S3 with a job that just dumps JSON files to it every 15 mins.

Agree. I had no idea.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=256

How did you find that? I've been using HN for a while, and lurking even longer, but never stumbled across that.

I honestly don't remember. Maybe some thread like this one. Or some googling.

Now, if we only had this comments within threads...

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

The "Best" link is for recent (for some value of "recent"), top-rated submissions. For all-time, top-rated submissions:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=+&sort...

I wrote a previous post with some other "points-related" queries here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4659939

Does HN Search only have content from the last (time period)?There's definitely some stuff that seems to be missing.

http://hckrnews.com/

This website has made hn like 10 times more addictive for me.

Another noteworthy hacker news digest: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

also this https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

What is classic exactly, how does it differ? At a first glance it seems to prioritize age over points more than the current version.

Classic is pg's solution to the "Endless September" problem.

Classic hn only counts front-page upvotes from users who have been around for awhile. I don't know what awhile is. Longer than me.

From memory it's the first year. I think I missed the cut off by a couple of weeks. I'm New Coke, but that still has more HN street cred than Coke Zero.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know why in the leaders list only the user "Libertatea" has no avg karma info?

Not enough comments yet.

I see, only few comments, but already 18334 points...

> only few comments

… and 5 submission only for today

Notice how it's almost entirely headlines from large news sites posted evenly pretty much every single day.

This isn't an accusation as such but I'd suspect it's (semi)-automated or it's someone who is amazingly diligent and consistent in posting interesting news.

o.O so many points! It doesn't look like a bot, but it has certainly a browser extension that posts to HN with a click.

There's the HN bookmarklet.

Anyone considering similar extensions could make a visible guide for 80 characters, so submitters don't have to count chars.

They're on Reddit too, same general technique and username.

I'm leaning toward the 'amazingly diligent and consistent' theory myself. After all I have like no submissions and tons of comments, so who am I to judge? ;)

I wonder why this isn't advertised anywhere. Does it only include submissions from the past three days?

I never knew about "best" or "lists". Awesome. Thanks.

I believe you, but I don't know how anyone could miss the "best" page. It's one of only six links across the top banner of the HN site. Often it's more fun to peruse "new", though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

For me, there is no 'best' or 'list' link at the top of the page.

Only if I go directly to the URLs for best or list, do those links get added to the nav bar. Normally the nav bar is just:

Oops. I didn't realize this was added by the Hacker News Enhancement Suite Chrome Extension I've been using. Sorry for that accusation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

It's actually only in the top bar when you're on the best page.

As far as I'm aware, it's only 'advertised' on the Lists page, which is the first of 12 links to the bottom of the page.

Lists is in the lower left corner, just above the search box, under the horizontal rule.

It seems to go back up to three days. This is great to catch up HN after fishing week-end!

how does best differ from the homepage? not sure i get it.

Sorting based on points.

As opposed to...?

The home page has a complicated algorithm that seems to take many variables into account to determine the 'hottest' / 'best new' stories (including measures to punish cheating etc.).

As far as I can see the 'best' page seems to simply take all articles submitted in the past ~3 days or so, sort them according to the number of points, and show the top 30 in that order.

Of course, the 'best' page works only thanks to the upvotes articles get (mainly) on the home page.

Time degrades points more slowly on /best, so it will usually show the top stories from the past 3(ish) days rather than the past 12-24 hours. Perfect for when you've been away for a few days and looking to invest some time in reading.

Oh nice, I was using rss of other people that did this themselfs, but know I might use this!

EDIT: Nevermind, this doesn't have rss!

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