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Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean?
- jerrac 11y agoNo idea, but I'm guessing the percentage of votes that positive. Or something related to that.
- 0942v8653 11y agoStories cannot be downvoted, no matter how much karma you have.
- rev_bird 11y agoA TWIST! Now I have no idea what these could be.
- fimoreth 11y agoThat's what I was thinking as well. I refreshed the page repeatedly and saw the percentage fluctuate as the score only went up. Not exactly a foolproof test though. I think you're probably still right.
- spydum 11y agoHeat/trending of some sorts?
- jeo1234 11y agoI think it is likely something along these lines. I up-voted this question and the percentage rose.
- enraged_camel 11y agoBut I upvoted another submission and the percentage fell!
- ymse 11y agoDid you have Javascript disabled? Upvoting with JS enabled generates an additional GET request for an image with the same href as the vote button. Perhaps part of their security minded hacker detection system. ;)
- jerrac 11y agoIf @0942v8653 is correct, stories can't be downvoted, then this sounds like the best guess to me. :)
- enraged_camel 11y agoThis is a chance for moderators to conduct a social experiment: let people speculate in this thread for two days before revealing what it is. Just to see what crazy theories people come up with! :)
- joaq 11y agoAnd after two days it turns out it's a random number.
- inopinatus 11y agoI like it. Crowdsourcing your ideas. A meta-MVP.
- vowelless 11y ago"freshness"
- other_herbert 11y agoPercentage of visitors that click it?
- netcraft 11y agospeculation: could be the ratio of how many people upvote vs how many view the link?
- 542458 11y agoThats an interesting theory, but unless everybody votes way more often than me those numbers seem really high.
- netcraft 11y agoagreed, they are relatively high for that.
- guiomie 11y agois there an xhr attached to opening of the link in a new tab?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- geofft 11y agoDoes HN even track how many people view the link? As far as I can tell, there's no JS on the home page other than the not-even-AJAX powering the upvote and downvote buttons, and they're not using <a ping>, so I'm not sure how that information would get back to the servers.
- gradys 11y agoYou could simulate it by recording its position on the front page for each impression. Assume that higher positions on the page are seen more. Then your metric is something like upvotes per position-discounted impression. On the other hand, I'm not sure that dang would get much value out of this kind of metric unless he was trying to tune the ranking algorithm or something like that.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Springtime 11y agoIt's quite distracting. There's already enough text packed closely together as it is.
- fimoreth 11y agoAlso, why are some red & grey? Looks like it turns red at 50%.
- jeo1234 11y agoDon't think so. Last time I looked this question was at 72 and grey, there was another which was 23 and red.
- adventured 11y agoAny normal posts turn red at 51% and above. Ask HN posts never turn red. Went back through the top 500 posts, all of the reds are 51% or above. Might be some other variable that triggers a rare sub 51% red, but I can't find an example right now.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 542458 11y agoThe colors are strange too. Some percents in red, some in gray, but it doesn't seem to be directly correlated with the quantity displayed or the post age.
- jeo1234 11y agoI think the colours may relates to the way the story is trending (up or down).
- Absentinsomniac 11y agoAll of the colors above 50 percent seemed to be red, while none below were.
- ZoF 11y agoI though it was %upvoted/downvoted as well. >Posting in epic thread.
- other_herbert 11y agoTotally out there option... Rain percentage from the geolocation of the ip that submitted it
- blairbeckwith 11y agoAnd, they're gone.
- archimedespi 11y agoI don't see them either.
- polemic 11y agoWhat does it mean if I can't see them while logged in?
- adventured 11y agoNothing, they've disabled them now.
- jeo1234 11y agoMaybe YC has made part of the sorting algorithm public. Perhaps by accident.
- pshc 11y agoWas it an indicator of the quality of the comments section? Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.
- dang 11y ago> then HN went down We prefer to call that "restarting the server" :)
- spydum 11y agoI really admire you guys for keeping it simple. I have seen too many outages due to piss poor "high availability" design, which would have simply been avoided by not trying to be highly available! Damn, we really need a catchy term/phrase for that (besides ironic)
- dang 11y agoThank you. Praise for simplicity is high praise.
- dredmorbius 11y agoAs simple as possible. But no simpler.
- dang 11y agoThat's not usually the side anyone has trouble with.
- dredmorbius 11y agoIn which case I'm nobody. I've criticised a number of projects for overcompressing the problem domain. Larry Wall's written on this eloquently. And I'm not criticising HN's server infrastructure. Earlier discussion of style/presentation somewhat. Though for that I'm as inclined to criticise overdesign as well -- mostly on other sites, though arguably table-based layouts are a kludge.
- rdtsc 11y agoThe numbers of this post were 106/70% , then I upvoted it, refreshed, it became 107/69%. So maybe percentage is how many people viewed the front page but didn't upvote it (since you can't downvote it)... ... A-a-and it's gone now...
- dang 11y agoI was experimenting with collecting some stats on posts and accidentally published that version of the page. Normally I'd say sorry, but this turned out to be so amusing that I guess I'm not sorry. Carry on! Edit: you guys blow my mind. One of these years we should do this on purpose.
- jeo1234 11y agoWhich stats?
- stevesearer 11y agoI remembered there being special options and information for mods from a post a while ago and was able to dig up this screenshot which contains a % score: http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt The mystery continues! :) EDIT: And apparently that % score was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972234
- adventured 11y agoSo now you're going to leave a thousand hackers to figure out what it did without any further hints. I see how it is.
- dang 11y agoThe mystery is so much better.
- zer00eyz 11y agoI have to ask, why are you even LOOKING at a production server on Friday? Do you like wrecked weekends, cause thats how you get wrecked weekends.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eck 11y agoYeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of news downtime.
- mukyu 11y agohttp://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png http://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png an example for those that did not see it
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chatci43 11y agohttp://efechat1.tr.nu http://efechat1.tr.nu