
50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math) - Quartertotravel
https://medium.com/swlh/best-of-2015-pfffffffft-79d9b014f4de#.trixqhj79
======
ColinWright
Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806982)

Also posted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812342)

~~~
padator
So I guess this medium post will eventually be part of his own list.

------
rainhacker
How I Explained REST to My Wife's original post taken down by the author:

"After receiving a number of reasonable complaints about the gender-oriented
nature of this article from people I respect very much, I’ve decided to take
it down for good. While the dialog was never intended as commentary on the
role of gender in technology, I’m convinced that it could too easily be taken
that way and am not at all comfortable with that possibility.

My deepest apologies to anyone that was offended by my work. There is nothing
more terrifying to me than the thought of something I created acting as a
deterrent to anyone following their ambitions, or from forming them in the
first place." [http://2ndscale.com/rtomayko/2004/rest-to-my-
wife](http://2ndscale.com/rtomayko/2004/rest-to-my-wife)

What a shame- such an illuminating post had to be taken down by the author. I
remember being asked in some interviews questions like how would you explain a
hashmap to a 5 year old or your grandmother. I will be afraid to ask such
questions, who knows how people see things these days.

~~~
cruise02
"...to a 5 year old" should be pretty safe. "...to your grandmother" could be
construed as both sexist and ageist, so I'd avoid it.

~~~
CaptSpify
Personally, I don't really see much of a difference. Some 5 year olds are
better at $x than "grandmothers". So wouldn't "to a 5 year old" be ageist as
well?

~~~
cruise02
Use some common sense. For how many values of $x _that would be the subject of
an interview question_ are 5 year olds going to be better than grandmothers?

~~~
CaptSpify
Your missing the point though: There's a reason the "non-technical
grandmother" is a stereotype. By using "common sense", it makes sense to use
that stereotype.

~~~
cruise02
Please do advertise that since there's a reason for stereotypes, your company
uses them in making hiring decisions. Let me know how that goes over.

~~~
CaptSpify
I really don't think I'm getting your point. It's OK go stereotype for one
group, but not another?

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owenversteeg
I love how 6 years later, "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of
Programming Languages" is still being submitted 6 times a year, getting 1243
points, and is the top post of 2015. Just goes to show how amazingly hilarious
it is. I think anyone here should reread it, even if you already have several
times.

[http://james-iry.blogspot.ca/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-
mo...](http://james-iry.blogspot.ca/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-
wrong.html)

------
minimaxir
Note that with the Hacker News dataset now on BigQuery, downloading the
dataset is unnecessary and the analysis in the post can be done in _seconds_ :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)
(although, parsing the domains using that particular dataset is harder since
it requires a regex to extract the domain from a URL)

As a side note, I'm sorta annoyed that a data post with so few data and
visualizations, _but with a linkbait title and selfpromotional startup copy_ ,
was far more successful than any of my data posts. Did I miss the part where
the OP explained _how_ he used math / how he ranked the Top 50 startups?

~~~
maxpupmax
I think what explains the difference is that the author is a writer by trade
-- not a statistician.

The author successful tells a simple story with unexpected tidbits and
concrete language (eg "every submission you see here is certifiably timeless")
and does a good job following writing best practices like "not burying the
lead".

You might be interested in reading "Make it Stick" (it's where I learned about
this subject from) if you haven't already -- and/or the Priceonomics guide to
content marketing.

Clickbait title probably didn't hurt either.

~~~
minimaxir
The point is _that is it not a good thing_ , especially in the case I'm having
difficulty reproducing the results.

~~~
maxpupmax
I'm not qualified to comment on what's "good" or not. I'd just be willing to
bet that if you wrote your own best-of with better/reproducible methodology
AND borrowing some established copywriting practices you'd easily outrank this
post... but only if you do both parts.

------
danso
Besides the concept of "best" being "found using math"...I don't really get
even the metric here. Posts that have been submitted over the years and have
gotten a lot of points? Why is that by any standard a more reasonably
explainable metric than just posts which have garnered the most points,
period, barring things like obits (e.g. Steve Jobs)?

This is harder to compute, but I'd argue that the best posts are the ones that
garner a shitton of upvotes while also not being overly political ("Drop
Dropbox") or tied to a current news event ("G is for Google") or originates
from or otherwise involves a major proper noun (e.g. "Why I Hated Working At
Google/Facebook/Amazon").

Among recent hits, "Make a programmable mirror" comes to mind [1], as does
"I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115"
[2]. And hell, much of what's been submitted from idlewords.com.

I don't get how "timelessness" is measured. The Brutal Ageism of Tech [3], for
example, is from 2014...being popular for 2 years is not necessarily timeless.

This is not to say any of the things on the list _aren 't_ great. But the word
"best" means something relatively absolute. I didn't expect to see a list of
the unquestionable "best"...but I did expect to see a bit more math. If we're
talking about HN specifically, as in, things that impacted the HN
community...I would expect an assessment to have some heuristic scoring of the
discussions generated, including number of upvotes, number of unique
participants, and number of longtime participants. Or even a metric based on
unusualness of participants...for example, a story and discussion that elicits
a "We're investigating this now" from Matt Cutts [4] should have some weight
(though obviously, measuring the external impact of a HN discussion, such as
the ban on Rapgenius, is outside the purview of an automated classifier)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204018)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155)

[3] [https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-
brut...](https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-
ageism)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658)

~~~
minimaxir
If you had a heuristic to more accurately rank links than the current
time/score based algorithms, you'd have a _million dollar startup idea_.

Which is something that wouldn't be revealed in a blog post. Or OP's random
daily email newsletter.

~~~
danso
Well, I like to think I have lots of million dollar ideas ;)

However, in this case, a retrospective algorithm doesn't have to compete in
the same category as the one that ranks and applies gravity to the
submissions. Ignoring the effect of flags and manual moderation, the ranking
algorithm has to work in near real time -- and it seems to, as occasionally a
single upvote will send a submission straight up the front page depending on
its current gravity -- while not causing the server to shit the bed.

A retrospective algorithm doesn't have to be that efficient, and can
drastically reduce computation by filtering for past submissions that have
received a cutoff of top votes. Running various aggregations/analysis on
discussion can likewise be done in relative peace. Furthermore, you have the
ability to provide external heuristics...for example, filtering for
submissions that were first submitted to HN before getting strong notice on
Twitter or Reddit (which can be done by comparing URL submissions and
timestamps).

This is not to say that coming up with the "best" or even "better" is trivial.
It's just that the computational factors are significantly different between
the algorithm that has to do real-time ranking and one that performs a
historical analysis.

That said, it'd be an interesting challenge to create a relatively simple bot
that auto-submitted popular links in the same way that the popular Facebook
"On this day" plugin works...the heuristic could be very simple: submit only
URLs that haven't made the front page within the last 1.5 years and garnered
200+ upvotes...and then some filtering to avoid submitting obituaries or other
current-event type posts. If the HN mods give approval to run a spam bot, I'll
give it a try :)

------
edem
Is there a favorite button somewhere? :)

