
SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News - chengmi
http://searchyc.com/top/list
======
pg
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.

~~~
chengmi
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.

~~~
kajecounterhack
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.

------
bayareaguy
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.

~~~
chengmi
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:

    
    
      Top Points per Submission
      +-------------+------+----+---------+
      | username    | pts  | ct | avg     |
      +-------------+------+----+---------+
      | dwaters     |   95 |  1 | 95.0000 | 
      | keesj       |   78 |  1 | 78.0000 | 
      | brl         |  122 |  2 | 61.0000 | 
      | a-kill-ease |   60 |  1 | 60.0000 | 
      | zombo       |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 | 
      | markovich   |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 | 
      | fresno      |   55 |  1 | 55.0000 | 
      | jdale27     |   53 |  1 | 53.0000 | 
      | qwertyy     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 | 
      | jsomers     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 | 
      +-------------+------+----+---------+
    
      Top Points per Comment
      +------------+------+----+---------+
      | username   | pts  | ct | avg     |
      +------------+------+----+---------+
      | hazchem    |   37 |  1 | 37.0000 | 
      | capablanca |   36 |  1 | 36.0000 | 
      | jdrake3    |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 | 
      | juanjose   |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 | 
      | cetaganda  |   41 |  2 | 20.5000 | 
      | cysh       |   19 |  1 | 19.0000 | 
      | chime      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
      | zamfi      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
      | kilik      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
      | loumf      |   15 |  1 | 15.0000 | 
      +------------+------+----+---------+

~~~
nostrademons
Add a cutoff of, say, 10 comments or 10 posts...

~~~
chengmi
Done. I set a minimum of 10 comments or 10 submissions to get on the list:

<http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_submission>

<http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_comment>

~~~
Xichekolas
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.

~~~
chengmi
Now when you search for your username on searchyc.com, you can see your stats:
<http://searchyc.com/Xichekolas>

------
alaskamiller
[http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best-
of-h...](http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best-of-hacker-
news/)

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.

~~~
mixmax
A proposal for an experiment:

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.

It would be really interesting to see...

~~~
chengmi
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).

~~~
aston
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.

~~~
rms
It is for lower point stories and comments, but for 75 point stories you don't
get exactly 74 karma. I'm not sure what the threshold and algorithm is.

------
mixmax
Good stuff - thanks a lot.

So is the search algorithm implemented in arc ? ;-)

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edw519
Well done. Thank you.

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bfioca
You just decimated my productivity. :p

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dfranke
Can we have a highest-modded comments scoreboard?

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rokhayakebe
now how many users does news.yc have?

~~~
pg
Around 8000 unique ips per day lately.

