Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean? - flippant
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dang
I was experimenting with collecting some stats on posts and accidentally
published that version of the page.

Normally I'd say sorry, but this turned out to be so amusing that I guess I'm
not sorry. Carry on!

Edit: you guys blow my mind. One of these years we should do this on purpose.

~~~
zer00eyz
I have to ask, why are you even LOOKING at a production server on Friday? Do
you like wrecked weekends, cause thats how you get wrecked weekends.

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eck
Yeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of
news downtime.

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mynegation
Given how much of a time sink HN is for everyone including YC startups, it may
well be that HN downtime is a profit for YC.

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other_herbert
Totally out there option... Rain percentage from the geolocation of the ip
that submitted it

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rdtsc
The numbers of this post were 106/70% , then I upvoted it, refreshed, it
became 107/69%.

So maybe percentage is how many people viewed the front page but didn't upvote
it (since you can't downvote it)...

... A-a-and it's gone now...

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mukyu
[http://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png](http://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png) an example
for those that did not see it

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ghayes
Now let's see if someone can pull from the API and cross-correlate to figure
out what they likely meant.

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pshc
Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section?

Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server
restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.

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jeo1234
Seems unlikely, pretty hard to attached a computer created value to something
like that.

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adventured
In this case, you'd do it based on the upvoting and downvoting ratios of
comments.

50 comments, with 15 grey comments = bad sentiment, lots of negativity, non-
productive conversations etc. Then come up with a scoring algorithm, with red
being volatile or bad sentiment so the moderators can spot them instantly
visually.

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enraged_camel
This is a chance for moderators to conduct a social experiment: let people
speculate in this thread for two days before revealing what it is. Just to see
what crazy theories people come up with! :)

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joaq
And after two days it turns out it's a random number.

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raidan
A random number that goes up when you upvote..

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Semiapies
Maybe it's the likeliness of a story to appeal to you, based on your past
votes?

Of course, now the percentages are gone.

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jeo1234
Maybe YC has made part of the sorting algorithm public. Perhaps by accident.

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542458
The colors are strange too. Some percents in red, some in gray, but it doesn't
seem to be directly correlated with the quantity displayed or the post age.

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Absentinsomniac
All of the colors above 50 percent seemed to be red, while none below were.

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blairbeckwith
And, they're gone.

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archimedespi
I don't see them either.

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spydum
Heat/trending of some sorts?

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jeo1234
I think it is likely something along these lines. I up-voted this question and
the percentage rose.

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enraged_camel
But I upvoted another submission and the percentage fell!

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ymse
Did you have Javascript disabled? Upvoting with JS enabled generates an
additional GET request for an image with the same href as the vote button.

Perhaps part of their security minded hacker detection system. ;)

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Springtime
It's quite distracting. There's already enough text packed closely together as
it is.

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vowelless
"freshness"

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jerrac
No idea, but I'm guessing the percentage of votes that positive. Or something
related to that.

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0942v8653
Stories cannot be downvoted, no matter how much karma you have.

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rev_bird
A TWIST! Now I have no idea what these could be.

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ZoF
I though it was %upvoted/downvoted as well.

>Posting in epic thread.

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other_herbert
Percentage of visitors that click it?

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netcraft
speculation: could be the ratio of how many people upvote vs how many view the
link?

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geofft
Does HN even track how many people view the link? As far as I can tell,
there's no JS on the home page other than the not-even-AJAX powering the
upvote and downvote buttons, and they're not using <a ping>, so I'm not sure
how that information would get back to the servers.

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gradys
You could simulate it by recording its position on the front page for each
impression. Assume that higher positions on the page are seen more. Then your
metric is something like upvotes per position-discounted impression.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that dang would get much value out of this
kind of metric unless he was trying to tune the ranking algorithm or something
like that.

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fimoreth
Also, why are some red & grey? Looks like it turns red at 50%.

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jeo1234
Don't think so. Last time I looked this question was at 72 and grey, there was
another which was 23 and red.

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adventured
Any normal posts turn red at 51% and above. Ask HN posts never turn red. Went
back through the top 500 posts, all of the reds are 51% or above. Might be
some other variable that triggers a rare sub 51% red, but I can't find an
example right now.

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polemic
What does it mean if I can't see them while logged in?

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adventured
Nothing, they've disabled them now.

