4 ms·
Ask HN: What are the best links that we've missed?
It might have been a bad headline. Maybe it got buried on Erlang day. Whatever the reason, sometimes quality submissions slip through the cracks.
Sometimes we catch these: RiderOfGiraffes excellent greybeard stories ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1001279 ) is one example - Khan Academy is another ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059076 ), sometimes we miss stuff.
So HN - What have been your favorite submissions (either from you or someone else) that the rest of us overlooked?
EDIT: Probably best to link to the HN submission (include a direct link as well if you like)
- cperciva 17y agoI think my 'Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage' post deserved more attention than it received -- AFAIK it is the first (and perhaps only?) time someone published exactly what SimpleDB requests cost. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227327 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227327
- PStamatiou 17y agohttp://hnweekly.chibidesign.com/ http://hnweekly.chibidesign.com/
- csuper 17y agoThat's really cool! I sometimes go on streaks of actual work and always knew I was missing some great stuff. Thanks.
- paraschopra 17y agoI was actually thinking of making a predictive model which would rate the new stories automatically. There are a lot of features that can be used in learning the prediction model: text length, content, etc. I already have the infrastructure more or less ready: http://www.wingify.com/contextsense/ http://www.wingify.com/contextsense/ In my opinion automatically rating posts will provide a useful filter to find stories that the community may have missed due to timezone/title issues. What do you think about the idea?
- astroguy 17y agoNice Idea, I am curious to know how contextsense give ratings.. could you please describe in more detail .. Thank you
- paraschopra 17y agoIt doesn't give out ratings. It will rather generate tags and categories which represent a submission. Tags such as: erlang, database, module, in-memory, etc. You can also generate other features such as word count, presence of images, (domain name, poster's name, etc.) Now what you do is to go through all (or as many as you could) stories that have been on HN front page, calculate features for those stories. Those features are used to learn a prediction model which you can apply to new stories to predict ratings.
- whatusername 17y agoI like the general concept.. The only issue I really see is with promoting groupthink. Doesn't that approach create a positive feedback loop. (TO be specific - if those predictions were exposed in a meaningful way, people would be more likely to view those stories, thus they would be upvoted, thus similar stories would be predicted to be successful) The second issue is that stuff like this: (One of mine but I think it was a fascinating article) would probably fail any relevancy test: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378 Concepts: Charm, Bed and Breakfast, Localities, Lodging, Ohio
- paraschopra 17y agoI think HN community is composed of mostly independent thinkers, so what it will more likely do is to expose interesting stories to them, it is their choice in the end to actually upvote or not. (That is precisely the problem we are trying to solve: interesting stories not getting noticed). Yes, the algorithm won't be perfect but it could factor in historical data such as previously how many upvotes submitor's other stories got or how many votes did the stories from that website got. On both those counts, your post will score high.
- akkartik 17y agoResubmitting the runt of my recent submissions: the myth of college football http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059489 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059489
- Alex3917 17y agoFrom my last twenty submissions... Pretending objects: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/16/pretending-and-games.html http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/16/pretending-and-games.ht... Superstitious beliefs cemented before birth: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/10/30/paranormal-superstitions.html http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/10/30/paranormal-supersti... Sacraficial virgins of the Mississippi: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/08/06/cahokia/index.html http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/08/06/cahokia/index.h... Also, anything that isn't text rarely makes the front page regardless of how good it is. On that note, I think the new technology developed to create the movie Oceans is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfjEydlUdT8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfjEydlUdT8
- jamesbritt 17y agoIdle thought: A script running on HN that, on slow news days, looks back on submissions on high news days and finds those that (by some criteria) got pushed off the the radar too quickly. It then selects some number of these (again, by whatever criteria, TBA, etc.) and re-submits them. That way, slow news days go away, and decent links get a second chance.
- yungchin 17y agoA couple of days ago I was really looking for everyone's insights on this patent application by Google: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042128 ... but the original title I put on it didn't make clear what it was (I think it said "Google News related"). If it could get a second chance, I'm still quite curious what people think.
- rms 17y agoThis one didn't make it because of tweet down-weighting. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049016 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049016 Still no confirmation...
- jayliew 17y agoI use PostRank (what used to be AideRSS) to sift through my piles of hundreds of RSS feeds. Basically some feeds are so high volume that I can say, "give me the top 30% most popular" only and just look at those. There are buckets like "good", "great", etc. It does various things to determine the interesting-ness of a blog post. http://www.postrank.com/ http://www.postrank.com/