
Predicting Popularity of Posts on Hacker News (2016) [pdf] - adgasf
http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2016/report/GengYuanWang-PredictingPopularityOfPostsOnHackerNews-report.pdf
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hanoz
I predict this post would be a lot more popular if its title ended with "with
machine learning".

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AndrewKemendo
_The content of a news post is the most powerful source for predicting its
popularity._

I would like to believe this is true, and I would guess that it's probably
more true on HN than elsewhere, but I would really like to see them dive more
into how they came to this conclusion.

I think the moderator led title editing makes this comparison more difficult
(not bad necessarily) but it would be worth comparing popularity:content to
popularity:title to have a more rigorous understanding.

Overall I applaud the approach they took. It seems however that the
conclusion/output doesn't give better insight into the parameters which drive
post popularity on HN, over previous approaches which seek to understand the
underlying voting mechanism [1]. While different they are trying to basically
understand the question "what makes for a popular post on HN."

Modeling the sentiment of a community under a formal mechanism (vote algo) is
incredibly difficult to do correctly, so again kudos for the work and it seems
like it's something that could be built on.

[1][http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-
new...](http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-
algorithm/)

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patmcguire
It isn't too particular to hacker news, although I did like the tables,
definitely recognized the topics.

SELECTED TOPICS EXTRACTED BY NMF

Topic 1 js javascript node react component python config browser

Topic 2 pple iphone ipad fbi mac cook sir headphone watch steve

Topic 3 invest startup fund venture capital entrepreneur tech raise

Topic 4 game pokemon vr nintendo virtual oculus headset steam

Topic 5 email clinton website inbox gmail slack spam campaign

Topic 7 tesla vehicle musk autopilot elect autonomous battery road

Topic 8 facebook twitter advertise zuckerberg messenger snapchat

Topic 11 docker deploy cloud kubernet swarm cluster microservices

Topic 12 ai intelligence algorithm neurual deep alphago deepmind

Topic 14 uber ride city lyft tax vehicle hail self did transport kalanick

