Hacker News All-Time Top Links
lab.varun.io
lab.varun.io
....Boy was I wrong.
That aside, it's sad how many of the top posts are negative in some way, even if you exclude the death announcements. The exact count depends on whether you consider things like PG banning SOPA companies to be "negative" news, but only a small handful of the top 30 links are truly positive (eg, Light Table).
It's also interesting how many (or few) of the posts are technical in their nature. I believe I count two that are completely non-technical (mine, and the other one about the TSA), and three or four that are about software that people have built (Meteor, etc.).
The rest are "in the middle" - mostly about people important to the tech community (Dennis Ritchie, Aaron Swartz, etc.), or about political issues related to technology, but not talking about the technology itself in any depth.
This pattern continues even if you look beyond the top 30.
I wonder if this has changed over time as the HN community has grown - perhaps in the morning I'll try filtering out posts less than X days old and see how that affects the top results.
Light Table and Meteor are cases where that wasn't true; where the initial version came out of nowhere and did something amazing enough that people did immediately switch to it, and evangelize it. The problem is that, for most things, this sort of "Apple press event" release requires a level of development-in-secret which I don't think is possible for FOSS software developed by more than one person.
On the other hand, really negative events--deaths, disasters, etc.--tend to be unexpected and happen all at once, so they get their impact (and "evangelism", in a sense) all network-effected together.
I would only expect this pattern to remain this way.
Note that popularity in terms of votes should also be normalized with respect to traffic/users.
1: I'm using https://www.hnsearch.com/api, which the page itself seems to indicate is used by HN for certain views.
2: The url is http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett... The API won't let you fetch more than 1000 results in total (using limit and start in tandem).
3: I'm fairly certain the API is fairly new because I never came across any results older than 2010 while fiddling with it. As such the couple of suggestions of weighting by active users might not return the desired balanced result.
4: I'm fetching the results at one go (all 1000) from the API through a cron the runs once every 48 hours.
Why should Show HN posts dominate this list? By their very nature, things shown in their alpha or beta state should have a select, limited base of fans..they are at the starting point, with no full accomplishments at that point.
By when someone dies, the fact that they merit a news post, and then an HN submission, signifies that they had accomplished very much in life...the up votes are well-deserved and come out of genuine appreciation as much as remorse.
The most up voted obituary posts should be up voted the most, as they, by their nature, are about the most accomplished of our peers, idols, and mentors.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=+&sortby=point...
But, it's cool to see old posts :)
It might be interesting to plot the top 4-5 posts per month.
The URL it points to is: http://lab.varun.io/hn_all_time_top_links/
But the page looks like this in my browser:
{{key + 1}}. {{link.item.title}}
({{link.item.domain}})
{{link.item.points}} points by {{link.item.username}} {{link.item.create_ts | fromNow}} | Google cache | {{link.item.num_comments}} comments on HN
"His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it." -Mona Simpson