News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by gus_massa on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:27PM (#16442982)
I'd prefer to sort them by points. By age is interesting, by the way.

Do you do some deduplication. Some classics are resubmitted a few times successfully. Perhaps add a third sort criteria, that is sorted by the number of big reposts.

Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by superasn on Friday February 23, 2018 @12:47PM (#16447919)
Yeah I'd prefer it too, so I've converted the stories.json into a spreadsheet here[1] using this simple PHP script[2]. Feel free to edit, sort them as you like!

I created this for my own use but sharing it here because others may find it useful (hope this isn't breaking any HN etiquette and if you're the original author and want me to take it down please let me know).

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16MNPM9fhpglC1s1OV-tp...

[2] https://gist.github.com/san-kumar/0b7d218a08d4d8b4a7d9c07db5...

Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by bringtheaction on Thursday February 22, 2018 @09:01PM (#16443596)
Problem with by points is that over time as more people come to HN the number of points are worth less, unless HN does like Reddit does and weighs them but even then such a system tends to change over time and so it’s still not comparable.

For example say that several years ago a post might hit front page and 500 people would vote on it. If 300 people voted up and 200 down then it gets 100 points.

Fast forward and now there are more people on the site. That means greater confidence in the percentage but because only points and not percentage of up/down is revealed, a post with similar percentage up- vs downvotes appears to be better. 600 up and 400 down is still 60% up vs 40% down but it results in 200 points total.

Like I said though maybe HN does account for this and 100 points today means the same percentage of people upvoted it, I don’t know.

Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by ZenoArrow on Friday February 23, 2018 @01:56AM (#16444725)
You can't downvote posts on HN, you can flag them but you can't downvote them. On HN, downvoting is only possible on comments.
Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by bringtheaction on Friday February 23, 2018 @03:35AM (#16445000)
You are right I forgot that, heh. Anyway, the problem remains that over time there will be more people to upvote so a post is likely to get more points if it was posted in the future than in the past.
Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by fghtr on Friday February 23, 2018 @04:59AM (#16445340)
Not really. Just tried to upvote an old post from 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243417

As a result, its score did not increase, although upvoting "worked".

Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by bringtheaction on Friday February 23, 2018 @05:59AM (#16445559)
No I mean that a front page post five years ago had fewer people to vote on it so it would get fewer points simply for that reason compared to a front page post today.
Re:Show HN: Hacker News Classics by exist on Thursday February 22, 2018 @11:25PM (#16444213)
Yes it looks like they do deduplication, based on the HTML source:

  for (var i in data[yr]) {
    var story = data[yr][i];
    if (seen_titles[story.title]) continue;
    seen_titles[story.title] = 1;
  // ...add story to list of stories
  };