SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News

http://searchyc.com/top/list

by chengmi • 18 years ago

50 26 18 years ago

searchyc.com

mixmax3• 18 years ago

Good stuff - thanks a lot.

So is the search algorithm implemented in arc ? ;-)

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

http://blog.searchyc.com/2008/02/searchyc-presents-best-of-h...

Today we're launching another feature of SearchYC: Top Lists. Using our index of Hacker News threads and comments, we've compiled lists of the most interesting items to date.

So what did we find? Sticking true to the Web 2.0 mentality, TechCrunch articles were the most submitted, by far. Other Silicon Valley favorites such as Valleywag, Mashable, and Wired also made it to the top.

As for top users, nickb gets the honor with more than 1900 submissions while pg has more than 2000 comments. Go ahead and take a look for yourself, and see if you can find other trends in Hacker News activity.

mixmax3• 18 years ago

A proposal for an experiment:

Having read a bit about the research in networks and graph theory that has been done over the last few years I think that submissions, activity of users and karma points follow a powerlaw. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law)

Seems like you have the numbers to confirm whether this is true or not.

It would be really interesting to see...

chengmi6• 18 years ago

If I understand the problem correctly, doesn't this list (http://searchyc.com/top/submitter) confirm that? Our data on users' karma is somewhat limited. Turns out that the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma (downmods have more weight).

bayareaguy2• 18 years ago

It would be nice to see two additional lists ranked by average karma/submission and average karma/comment. Being able to specify a time range qualification on the searches would be nice too.

chengmi6• 18 years ago

We gave that some consideration, but the queries weren't all that interesting. The vast majority of those lists (something like 80%) consist of people with only one post. To illustrate this, here are the top tens for those queries:

  Top Points per Submission
  +-------------+------+----+---------+
  | username    | pts  | ct | avg     |
  +-------------+------+----+---------+
  | dwaters     |   95 |  1 | 95.0000 | 
  | keesj       |   78 |  1 | 78.0000 | 
  | brl         |  122 |  2 | 61.0000 | 
  | a-kill-ease |   60 |  1 | 60.0000 | 
  | zombo       |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 | 
  | markovich   |   58 |  1 | 58.0000 | 
  | fresno      |   55 |  1 | 55.0000 | 
  | jdale27     |   53 |  1 | 53.0000 | 
  | qwertyy     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 | 
  | jsomers     |   48 |  1 | 48.0000 | 
  +-------------+------+----+---------+

  Top Points per Comment
  +------------+------+----+---------+
  | username   | pts  | ct | avg     |
  +------------+------+----+---------+
  | hazchem    |   37 |  1 | 37.0000 | 
  | capablanca |   36 |  1 | 36.0000 | 
  | jdrake3    |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 | 
  | juanjose   |   24 |  1 | 24.0000 | 
  | cetaganda  |   41 |  2 | 20.5000 | 
  | cysh       |   19 |  1 | 19.0000 | 
  | chime      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
  | zamfi      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
  | kilik      |   17 |  1 | 17.0000 | 
  | loumf      |   15 |  1 | 15.0000 | 
  +------------+------+----+---------+

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

It might be interesting to see a scatter plot of number of submissions/comments vs. average points per submission/comment.

What would be really cool is if you opened up a simple API or just the raw data so we could go wild with it :)

nostrademons• 18 years ago

Add a cutoff of, say, 10 comments or 10 posts...

far33d• 18 years ago

Like baseball statistics, these are only interesting if you have a minimum number of at-bats.

bayareaguy2• 18 years ago

Interesting. Perhaps you could aggregate the numbers by time and compare the relative rates of change in karma and subissions for different time periods?

edw519• 18 years ago

Well done. Thank you.

pg2• 18 years ago

The list of most commented threads is dominated by an artifact, because at the bottom of some essays I link to the News.YC thread as if it were for blog comments. E.g. "Microsoft is Dead" is not the most interesting story to News.YC readers. In fact, last time I looked, most of the recent comments were just people saying "fuck you" at various levels of articulateness.

chengmi6• 18 years ago

I agree that the "most commented threads" isn't exactly a "best of" list--in fact, they're some of the more controversial/ugly threads to appear on YC, but that's why I found it interesting.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

I agree with Paul about that because a lot of "Ask YC" threads have tons of comments but aren't really what I'm looking for...but what is useful is the SEARCH. THANK YOU SO MUCH for that.

I've always been afraid to contribute for fear that others have posted an article I encountered. Fear no more! Hello, new homepage.

Xichekolas2• 18 years ago

just people saying "fuck you" at various levels of articulateness

  <cynicism>Isn't that what 99% of all comments on the web are?</cynicism>

I think that is why I enjoy YC News so much, the rate is only like 30%.

dfranke• 18 years ago

Can we have a highest-modded comments scoreboard?

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

now how many users does news.yc have?

pg2• 18 years ago

Around 8000 unique ips per day lately.

bfioca• 18 years ago

You just decimated my productivity. :p

SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News

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