Skip to content

Comment on SearchYC Presents: Best of Hacker News

Comments

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.

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...

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).

What's the basis for the claim "the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma"? Pretty sure karma = 1 + every point beyond 1 point for any comment or submission.

It is for lower point stories and comments, but for 75 point stories you don't get exactly 74 karma. I'm not sure what the threshold and algorithm is.

I just tried runnning it through excel, and at first glance it does indeed look like it is a powerlav...

Would be good with more data though. Are the next 200 submitters available ?

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.