
Hacker News All-Time Top Links   - ajani
http://lab.varun.io/hn_all_time_top_links/
======
chimeracoder
When I wrote "Don't Fly During Ramadan" (#3 post), I anticipated it'd get a
few hundred hits from my friends if I was lucky. I almost didn't even post it
to HackerNews, until a friend told me I should.

....Boy was I wrong.

That aside, it's sad how many of the top posts are negative in some way, even
if you exclude the death announcements. The exact count depends on whether you
consider things like PG banning SOPA companies to be "negative" news, but only
a small handful of the top 30 links are truly positive (eg, Light Table).

It's also interesting how many (or few) of the posts are technical in their
nature. I believe I count two that are completely non-technical (mine, and the
other one about the TSA), and three or four that are about software that
people have built (Meteor, etc.).

The rest are "in the middle" \- mostly about people important to the tech
community (Dennis Ritchie, Aaron Swartz, etc.), or about political issues
related to technology, but not talking about the technology itself in any
depth.

This pattern continues even if you look beyond the top 30.

I wonder if this has changed over time as the HN community has grown - perhaps
in the morning I'll try filtering out posts less than X days old and see how
that affects the top results.

~~~
mbesto
Well, interestingly enough, not one of the top posts was created earlier than
2 years ago. This is obviously due to karma inflation and slightly akin to
saying that Avatar is the top grossing movie of all time (hint: it's not[1]
when you adjust for inflation). It'd be cool to see a normalized version of
this. If that's even possible...

[1]-[http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm](http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm)

~~~
victoriap
Normalizing per total users or karma has also some side effects. The
demographics of HN user base has most probably changed during the past years
as well as number of interesting stuff produced also changed. Now there is
more submissions more competition.

------
ajani
To answer the questions around source and weighting etc:

1: I'm using [https://www.hnsearch.com/api](https://www.hnsearch.com/api),
which the page itself seems to indicate is used by HN for certain views.

2: The url is
[http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?pretty_print=true&filter\[queries\]\[\]=url:*&sortby=points%20desc&limit=10&start=0)
The API won't let you fetch more than 1000 results in total (using limit and
start in tandem).

3: I'm fairly certain the API is fairly new because I never came across any
results older than 2010 while fiddling with it. As such the couple of
suggestions of weighting by active users might not return the desired balanced
result.

4: I'm fetching the results at one go (all 1000) from the API through a cron
the runs once every 48 hours.

------
olalonde
Too bad I didn't get the karma for "Show HN: This up votes itself". I think I
at least deserved a few points... :)

~~~
ajani
:) I did notice it when I was making it. In fact the idea to link to google
cache popped when I saw that the second highest link was dead, and figured
there might be others.

------
sethbannon
2 of the top 4 posts, and 4 of the top 20 posts are from less than one month
ago. A sign of HN's rising popularity.

~~~
qznc
Yes. A "best of all time" should account for "inflation".

------
AndrewKemendo
Very morbid - a lot of endings and very few beginnings. I think that makes a
case for the inauspicious HN post not giving a great indicator of start-up
success. For example if it were the other way around I would expect to see
many many more show HN posts on this list.

~~~
danso
I think that's not the only way to look at things. Death may be a "bad" thing,
but its a natural event that, for the most part, happens on a regular cycle.
The fact that these posts get up voted so much isn't an indicator of
morbidity, but a sign of how much the community appreciated a person's
accomplishments.

Why should Show HN posts dominate this list? By their very nature, things
shown in their alpha or beta state should have a select, limited base of
fans..they are at the starting point, with no full accomplishments at that
point.

By when someone dies, the fact that they merit a news post, and then an HN
submission, signifies that they had accomplished very much in life...the up
votes are well-deserved and come out of genuine appreciation as much as
remorse.

The most up voted obituary posts _should_ be up voted the most, as they, by
their nature, are about the most accomplished of our peers, idols, and
mentors.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die
to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever
escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the
single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the
old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too
long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to
be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be
trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s
thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything
else is secondary."

------
wavesounds
I'm not sure how you're collecting this data but any chance you could do
(points)/(# of [registered or active] users at the time it was posted)?

~~~
Achshar
Yea that would actually give a better dynamic of the number of votes. Right
now the top ones are the recent ones which makes sense since the number of
active users here is growing.

------
danso
Kind of funny that the user who posted the top ranking link -- the news of
Steve Jobs death -- that was just about the only thing he posted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patricktomas](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patricktomas)

~~~
Crisco
It's also rather funny (or sad) that a lot of the posts are about the death of
a person/project/business.

~~~
jacques_chester
"If it bleeds, it leads".

------
dylangs1030
There's an easier way to find this list.

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=+&sortby=point...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=+&sortby=points+desc)

But, it's cool to see old posts :)

------
erkose
Static content shouldn't require javascript.

~~~
bhrgunatha
Or cookies :(

~~~
erkose
Sure, but cookies are typically the result of using a web framework rather
than a design decision.

~~~
pestaa
Isn't using a web framework a design decision?

------
enscr
Half the posts are less than 1 year old. Wish there was a way to normalize it
against active users around the posting date.

It might be interesting to plot the top 4-5 posts per month.

------
tav
For anyone who wants this for themselves, here's a Python script [0] that
generates similar output [1]. It doesn't have the nice Google Cache feature
from ajani's version, but it does produce static HTML which some may prefer.

[0] [https://gist.github.com/tav/5545779](https://gist.github.com/tav/5545779)

[1] [http://tav.espians.com/temp/hacker-news-
top-1000.html](http://tav.espians.com/temp/hacker-news-top-1000.html)

------
JunkDNA
I wonder what this would look like if you normalized the number of points to
the total number of HN users. There is a huge bias here toward newer stories.

------
cdvonstinkpot
This post is broken to me right now. (Monday, 9/9 5am EST)

The URL it points to is:
[http://lab.varun.io/hn_all_time_top_links/](http://lab.varun.io/hn_all_time_top_links/)

But the page looks like this in my browser:

{{key + 1}}. {{link.item.title}}

({{link.item.domain}})

{{link.item.points}} points by {{link.item.username}} {{link.item.create_ts |
fromNow}} | Google cache | {{link.item.num_comments}} comments on HN

~~~
aw3c2
As dumb as it sounds this is because the site requires Javascript to load its
static content.

------
DavidWanjiru
Whoever did this, I'm a newbie to coding, and I'd want to see the code used to
pull this. I'm assuming it wasn't done manually. I've been thinking I'd want
to do something similar once I get the hang of it, and to play around with it.
"Hall of fame" comments or articles aren't the only ones someone new to HN
would be interested in, right? How about, for example, the speed at which an
article rises to the top? Or how long it remains at the top? And so on and so
forth. You could probably try to draw an analogy to music charts. I don't
know. But I'm working on knowing. So if you don't mind sharing, I'd
appreciate.

~~~
DavidWanjiru
Oh yeah, plus I keep hearing about how the quality of HN has dropped. I
imagine you could selectively pull stuff from back in the day, apply the same
popularity criteria to today, and compare the quality of what comes up. It's
small curiosities like this I want to learn how to pull off.

------
llimllib
Is the score scaled in any way, or just most points?

------
duck
If you like this, you might enjoy my Wayback Letter
([http://waybackletter.com](http://waybackletter.com)) which sends you the
best articles from each year of HN every week. Here is last week's issue:
[http://eepurl.com/EGWOv](http://eepurl.com/EGWOv).

------
acchow
Wow, I'd never read _A Sister 's Eulogy for Steve Jobs_ before.

"His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel
him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to
Steve, he achieved it." -Mona Simpson

~~~
aw3c2
Glorify more?

------
wdewind
How is this calculated? By raw points I should have somewhere around #60, but
my top post is not listed. I don't think it's a great post (just me bitching
about scores being taken away) so I guess I'm glad, but still curious.

------
ternaryoperator
Interesting how few of the links are about programming. I expect this is b/c
programming is largely about specific technologies, so will appeal to only
segments of the readership, whereas Steve Jobs dying has a more universal
interest.

------
falicon
I do a rolling daily list of the ones that have the most active comments at
[http://knowabout.it](http://knowabout.it) in case anyone is interested (it's
how this thread caught my attention)

------
chewxy
Wow, the amount of death posts.

------
nornagon
It'd be cool to see this adjusted for "vote inflation" \-- the HN population
was much smaller 2 years ago than it is now.

------
Grue3
Not surprised that the most pandering stuff (especially "Don't Fly During
Ramadan") is at the top.

------
tsaoutourpants
18th most popular HN story ever... w00t :)

------
DanielBMarkham
As another poster pointed out down-thread, this list really needs to be
adjusted for inflation.

------
gkrishnan
Steve Jobs obituary is the #1 post. Hats off to one of the greatest innovators
of our lifetime.

------
X4
Which are the most commented posts?

------
arbuge
It seems dominated by links about people dying and things shutting down.

------
neur0mancer
An option to detect and remove broken links could be nice.

------
forlorn
Unfortunately sad titles prevail.

