RJMetrics Blog

Welcome to HN.

It is a pretty popular web site with a part of the technical crowd. It gets analyzed a lot [1][2]. It also gets a lot of 'spam' (since coverage on the front page of HN can send you lots of traffic [3][4][5]) HN "scores" its participants using a counter 'karma' [6] which also affects features visible to your account (well at least the down vote button) And with any 'score' there are people who score more than others [7]. And where there is scoring there is competition.

The bottom line is that certain behaviors emerge for people who actively try to achieve a 'high score' (more karma) and people who are trying to achieve 'viriality'[8] (more exposure).

It was unkind of me to point out the behavior (usually I just note it and ignore it) and for that I apologize.

Colin (grandparent posting) has a 'thing' about stuff that gets doubly or triply or more posted. I understand the annoyance, it can get annoying. But I've also noted that he posts a lot of links :-) A number of people tend to complain when their version of the link doesn't make it to the front page when someone else's done (it's a 'I'm not getting that karma whine') And generally harmless (other than it sometimes back fires and they get down voted for whining)

[1] http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analysis/

[2] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

[3]…

Here's a list of relevant links I've compiled over the past year or two:

- http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news-a-comprehensive-answer/
- http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/
- http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/
- http://karpathy.ca/myblog/2013/11/27/quantifying-hacker-news-with-50-days-of-data/ https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html
- http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news-headlines/
- http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/
- http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_randomized_algorithms.html
- http://camdp.com/blogs/multi-armed-bandits
- http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html
- http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/17/surprising-hacker-news-data-analysis/
- http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/24/how-to-get-on-the-front-page-of-hacker-news/
- http://blog.datadive.net/which-topics-get-the-upvote-on-hacker-news/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134
- https://porter.io/blog/hackernews-cheaters-catch-me-if-you-can/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332889
- http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611
- http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scroll-of-death.html?

We have seen critical appraisals of past social media launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012)

<https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-study-reveals-minimal-social-activity-weak-user-engagement>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977050>

The study in question is, to my surprise, still available directly online: <https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/05/15/new-google-plus-data-shows-weak-user-engagement/>

There are another 14 HN submissions matching "Google+ ghost town" at this writing: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google%2B%20ghost%20town>

I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)

I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.

I have been trying to use probability in real life occurrence like this whenever I can, so let's get started back of the envelop style

according to this site http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables

Roughly 1.53 million students take up SAT every year and of which 10k students get perfect SAT score in Math (let's just focus on math for now)

so that's 0.67% (rounded) people getting a perfect score out of the total.

According to this data set, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analysis/

It says there are roughly 31k active users on HN, considering that I have personally seen many google employee's responding to a query/commenting on HN, let's assume a higher number of 2.5k.

so, 2.5k * 0.0067 which is about 17 people, so there are 17 active google employees on HN which have perfect SAT score in Math.

So that was my attempt, can someone provide a better probabilistic model? (maybe I will learn something new and exciting)

Please consider that none of those posts with any comments in them took place within the last two years. And "sadly" gets created just to tell people to read more books. Sad indeed...

EDIT:

HN seems to be stuck with XSS, SQLi, and malformed XML

HN is not a person: half of today's HN didn't exist two years ago [1].

[1] http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analysis/