Hi HN,
I built a microsite that live-tracks the top Hacker News stories and estimates their ranks based on publicly available info.
It can help one find the best time to post on HN by showing how much competition there is for the top positions in real-time.
The rank calculation formula is based on the following:
- Paul Graham's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
- Ken Shirriff's blog post: https://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work....
The positions implied by the calculated rank and the actual positions often don't match exactly because not all required info is public and because the formula is likely out-of-date. If you know how I can make it more accurate, please let me know.
The root mean square error (RMSE) between the implied and actual positions for the data so far is around 2.46. Running a brute-force to find better constants only gave a 3% improvement.
Now, let's see if we get some HN inception: an HN post about HN Rank shown on HN Rank itself.
Best,
Rok
