The list of most commented threads is dominated by an artifact, because at the bottom of some essays I link to the News.YC thread as if it were for blog comments. E.g. "Microsoft is Dead" is not the most interesting story to News.YC readers. In fact, last time I looked, most of the recent comments were just people saying "fuck you" at various levels of articulateness.
I agree that the "most commented threads" isn't exactly a "best of" list--in fact, they're some of the more controversial/ugly threads to appear on YC, but that's why I found it interesting.
I agree with Paul about that because a lot of "Ask YC" threads have tons of comments but aren't really what I'm looking for...but what is useful is the SEARCH. THANK YOU SO MUCH for that.
I've always been afraid to contribute for fear that others have posted an article I encountered. Fear no more! Hello, new homepage.
Today we're launching another feature of SearchYC: Top Lists. Using our index of Hacker News threads and comments, we've compiled lists of the most interesting items to date.
So what did we find? Sticking true to the Web 2.0 mentality, TechCrunch articles were the most submitted, by far. Other Silicon Valley favorites such as Valleywag, Mashable, and Wired also made it to the top.
As for top users, nickb gets the honor with more than 1900 submissions while pg has more than 2000 comments. Go ahead and take a look for yourself, and see if you can find other trends in Hacker News activity.
Having read a bit about the research in networks and graph theory that has been done over the last few years I think that submissions, activity of users and karma points follow a powerlaw. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law)
Seems like you have the numbers to confirm whether this is true or not.
If I understand the problem correctly, doesn't this list (http://searchyc.com/top/submitter) confirm that? Our data on users' karma is somewhat limited. Turns out that the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma (downmods have more weight).
What's the basis for the claim "the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma"? Pretty sure karma = 1 + every point beyond 1 point for any comment or submission.
It would be nice to see two additional lists ranked by average karma/submission and average karma/comment. Being able to specify a time range qualification on the searches would be nice too.
We gave that some consideration, but the queries weren't all that interesting. The vast majority of those lists (something like 80%) consist of people with only one post. To illustrate this, here are the top tens for those queries:
Would be neat to be able to see the pps and ppc values for an individual... I don't make either of those lists, but I'd be interested what my averages are.
Interesting. Perhaps you could aggregate the numbers by time and compare the relative rates of change in karma and subissions for different time periods?
