Yes I saw that it was posted before and reposted based on some recent sorting articles because it is so helpful. It is like Asimov's 'The Last Question' and 'How Software Companies Die' and others because it is very interesting.

An interesting static visualization from the other threads is here : http://www.hatfulofhollow.com/posts/code/visualisingsorting/...

I think seeing the timing and sorting in action is so helpful to understand what is going on.

Out of curiosity, are you keeping a log of popular HN posts or just remembering them and searching? You're always first on the scene and comprehensive, it seems.

I remember and search. My memory's pretty good, and my search-fu is also usually pretty good, although not always.

I'm currently looking at automating some of the process, but I do find that searching for stuff I think I remember occasionally turns up a gem I missed, and so I'm reluctant to automate it fully unless they still get found.

That's why I'm starting to feed items into a Bayesian classifier to find good stuff - by my standards and according to my interests. I continue to experiment.

I'd love to hear more details on your classifier. I've been interested in trying something like that for myself: a sort of automatic attention filter which brings both unmodeled outliers and probably-good articles to my attention.