I did normalize by number of favorites too, so each person had 1 vote shared over all their favorites. The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link, whereas people who have lots of favorites are using it differently to what I want to select for.

At some point I had a similar selection of Ask HN dominance. One problem with my data is I only grabbed the first page of favorite results.

EDIT: SHOOT, you exposed a bug, my parser skips things things without URLs! Hence I ended up filtering out most of the Ask HN's!

EDIT: Fixed it

Now my list looks a bit more similar to yours but not quite. Currently "Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?", your #1 is my #50. If I turn off normalization, it goes to #13 on my lists, so that has quite a significant impact on the rankings.

sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.

> sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.

Would that make this post a meta-favorite?

I'd actually assume one favourite to be a misclick.

But those would be randomly distributed so it would not affect the top ranks much.

> The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link

Perhaps karma or account age should join the equation.

Yeah, more recent articles should be penalised to normalize for the increased quantity of accounts.

I kind of liked the list without Tell/Ask HNs as well (it has the bash shell guide on it) so I made it a toggle.

I guarantee that a lot of favorites are just ‘to read later’. In that model, articles themselves are read at once or go into Pocket-like services, with selective perusal of comment sections. In most cases, comments are sorta predictable, or interesting perspectives are quickly exhausted—and only especially rich threads go into the favorites to later be pored over. However, interesting ‘Ask HNs’ are obviously followed by lots of interesting comments (hopefully), so they fall straight into the category to be sorted out with attention.

This needs links :( a gist perhaps?

1. Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418

2. Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745042

3. Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16775744

4. Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072

5. Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581361

6. Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588727

7. Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264911

8. Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22786853

9. Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115

10. Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151144

11. Questions to ask a company during a job interview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20916749

12. Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299180

13. Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092657

14. Systems Design for Advanced Beginners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23904000

15. Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400375

16. Teach Yourself Computer Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588896

17. Basic Social Skills Guide (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21585235

18. How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238135

19. Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105229

20. Machine Learning Crash Course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16493489

21. Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073

22. Gears - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310813

23. The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875

24. A guide to difficult conversations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490573

25. How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120275

26. Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21324768

27. Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229241

28. Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712194

29. Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702651

30. Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624

31. Build Your Own React - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536789

32. Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18104814

33. Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881

34. The missing semester of CS education - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380

35. Medium-hard SQL interview questions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053981

36. The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163251

37. My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184

38. Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22235279

39. Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660086

40. Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486657

41. Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15602538

42. Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900955

43. Advanced Data Structures (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044876

44. Immersive Linear Algebra (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264048

45. Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12713056

46. Tools for Better Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23339830

47. Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21900498

48. Startup idea checklist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20254057

49. Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17999659

50. Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23276456

Thank you! Now I just wonder - did you use some command line magic to do this, or did you compose it manually? (no complaints if you did, but it would be interesting to know how to do that in a line of script). Anyway, thanks again.

You can do this with Notepad++ and Block-Selection in like 1,2 Minutes:

- Paste the original list

- Block-Select (Alt + Pressed Mouse1) a block-line behind (trailing) all entries; I admit this step is hard to describe with words, but currently im unable to provide an image/video

- Paste "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id="

- Block-Select all ids from original list and paste it at the end

- You may be finished now or you can Regex-Replace " +" with " " to remove the long spaces between the link title and the link itself.

Block-Selection + Copy-Paste is amazingly fast for doing things like that.

Pretty dirty solution, but:

cat list| cut -d ' ' -f 4 | xargs -I{} echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={}" | paste list - | cut -d ' ' -f 5-

Sure. I just did it quickly in Python, it was all of about three or four lines long. I've gotten a bit rusty in Python so when I see a small task I try to give it a go.

Consider adding this comment on the grandparent. Thank you!

Favorited, thanks!

> 425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time

Interesting that a post about most favorited Hacker News posts is itself one of the most favorited Hacker News posts.

I totally missed that yesterday.

Could you please post this as a “Tell HN” post so that we can all favorite it and make it the most favorited post?

Jokes aside, such an official list posted once in a while (once a year) could be useful.

Much more interesting list, thank you.

Maybe people are favoriting Ask HN items because there are no external links.

I know that when there's a good HN discussion of a link, I usually bookmark the link itself, knowing that I can easily use that to look up HN discussions of it later. But if there is no external link, the only option is to bookmark the HN discussion itself.

Ask HN are just so hugely valuable. There are so many smart, experienced people here who are generous enough to post hard-won insights and information.

Yes! Same.

I think it's interesting at how many of these are "Ask HN" type posts. It could be that people are often seeking to gather specific crowd-sourced knowledge from experts, what happened to Quora?

I disabled my Quora account when I discovered it was selling my data.

I got rid of mine when they started paying people to ask questions, and the quality of questions plummeted. Also, the clearly fake "so-and-so would like you to answer a question" email notifications annoyed me.

SEOs happened

This community happened to it. The number of top-voted hacker news blog posts talking about how they acquired their first n users by shitposting on Quora about their startup are too many to enumerate. I think the difference between here and Quora is that the mods here are more opinionated and will kill posts that feel spammy/use voter rings/etc.

External links from Quora have the rel=nofollow attribute, so they don't help with SEO. Most SEOs would understand this.

Ask HN is the best feature of HN bar none and it is unfortunately under exposed as well. As far as I am concerned it could be the homepage.

What about most favorited comments?

140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15603013

108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

93 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436420

86 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400

81 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948078

76 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544

65 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12901356

63 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083

60 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833

58 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691212

57 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

57 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18536601

55 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

55 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260001

54 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402387

53 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104

53 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285438

52 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791601

51 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566

51 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787313

50 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12900448

49 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11341567

47 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604657

42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20609978

42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439478

40 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852771

39 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509533

38 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22808280

38 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16126082

37 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797

37 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21151830

37 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716969

36 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563

36 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775789

35 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754

33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571219

33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7260087

33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17714304

32 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043088

32 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253

30 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341288

29 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789438

29 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947

29 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14162853

28 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20869111

28 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720160

28 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287767

28 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055389

Ha, I see three of those are already gray-visited for me, and clicking them now, I see why!

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 was a great look at Oracle DB development

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 was one of the most hilarious situations of all time on HN

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 was a fun early Dropbox "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" moment.

I'm gonna have to check out some of these others that I haven't seen before! Great list, thanks!

Re 9224, I feel bad that BrandonM has been singled out that way because the comment has been universally misinterpreted. He was commenting on Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant back then) and trying to be helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

Top comments dont work so well as there is no curated titles. The content is good but may not be relevant to the reader

I think a prefix of the comment string is in most cases sufficient to disclose what the comment is about. I tried to include that above, but it got too tricky for silly technical reasons so I bailed.