I'm note sure /best would be that useful. For all intensive purposes it's static and changes only when a post beats the points on the list. Do you mean compare against http://news.ycombinator.com/news which has the current highest posts?
"... Front page isn't the ultimate snapshot. If you wanted that, wouldn't you rather take the 20 submissions from the last 24 hours that got the most up-votes? If I understand correctly what you're doing, you get some 1 and 2-point submissions that just happen to be on the front page at the time. ..."
One further point. An boundary case you might run up against is user 'deleted', which occurs when editors delete a submission. It only occurs only occasionally and you do not see it on HN pages.
Yeah, I only meant /best in the abstract, not considering the implementation limit of 180 links. In practice you could collect this information over time yourself.
The difference to what /news does would be that submissions with little points would not show in the results even briefly, and submissions with a lot of points wouldn't fall off even if you're away for a long time.
I'm note sure /best would be that useful. For all intensive purposes it's static and changes only when a post beats the points on the list. Do you mean compare against http://news.ycombinator.com/news which has the current highest posts?
"... Front page isn't the ultimate snapshot. If you wanted that, wouldn't you rather take the 20 submissions from the last 24 hours that got the most up-votes? If I understand correctly what you're doing, you get some 1 and 2-point submissions that just happen to be on the front page at the time. ..."
What you describe here is pretty much what /news and the RSS file http://news.ycombinator.com/rss does anyway. So you could just parse the http://news.ycombinator.com/news to do that or the RSS file. But the RSS file has some restrictions.
One further point. An boundary case you might run up against is user 'deleted', which occurs when editors delete a submission. It only occurs only occasionally and you do not see it on HN pages.