
Reverse Engineering the HN Ranking Algorithm - foob
http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/
======
mos_basik
Welp. I'm glad I managed to catch this in whatever window of time it was
visible on the site. Great analysis, reasonably readable.

While I might disagree with the methods used to suppress it, I understand why
the powers that be might not want this sort of article to be widely spread,
but what can you say. Thanks OP.

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mabynogy
Very cool!

And the IPython notebook is direct available here:
[https://github.com/sangaline/reverse-engineering-the-
hacker-...](https://github.com/sangaline/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-
ranking-
algorithm/blob/master/Reverse%20Engineering%20the%20Hacker%20News%20Ranking%20Algorithm.ipynb)

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awsoutage
Unironically, this was apparently censored (no realistic human interaction
would result in this post, which was gaining popularity quickly, disappearing
from the first 6 pages within moments).

Meanwhile, a post about YCombinator itself (the _US_ company) going to Canada
to skirt US visa regulation changes so that it can continue its access to
foreign founders whose exploitable economics are desirable to US founders...
remains on the first page.

This, IMHO.

This article was excellent, btw, despite my lack of basic calculus knowledge
and, thus, my inability to understand the notated equations.

~~~
dang
This article was flagged by users for some reason. Moderators never saw it
(edit: wrong, see below). If we had, we would have turned off the flags.

The post about YC and visas was untouched by moderators except that we
eventually downweighted it because it had spent such a long time on the front
page.

So what these two examples illustrate is not what we do, but how easily people
can find examples to fit any belief. We're always happy to answer questions
and correct mistakes though.

Edit: ok, I think I know what happened now. It's not true that a moderator
never saw the post: a moderator put 2010 on the title by mistake. I didn't
think to look for title changes when I checked the logs. Later, a user pointed
out the mistake and we corrected it.

In this case although we didn't penalize the post, it's possible that the
inaccurate '2010' annotation acted as a penalty without us intending it that
way. Obviously when we add years to submission titles, which we do every day,
the intention is to get it right, not wrong.

~~~
awsoutage
My comment above has just received a down-vote, despite being 2 days old, well
outside of the down vote time limit (unless there is a comment flag feature
without a time limit that I'm unaware of), at the same time @dang left a
reply.

So, another example of moderator tampering...? Or was there a recent up-vote
that was removed?

I guess we are all just conspiracy theorists.

------
ollyoxalls
Mods: please remove the 2010 in the title. The publication date is today and
the post discusses data from 2017.

