5 ms·

HN serves the same front page to all users, other than the bar at the top. To make a reddit front page, you have to look up the hottest results of ~100 subreddi

by raldi 10y ago

HN serves the same front page to all users, other than the bar at the top. To make a reddit front page, you have to look up the hottest results of ~100 subreddits and shuffle them all together in the correct order. Literally every time a vote is cast, that could change the front page for every single user, in a different way for each one.

swsieber 10y ago
False. It cannot since it has too look up the vote status for (logged in users).
- choward 10y ago
  What?
- flashman 10y ago
  I dunno man, I think I'm going to trust the former Reddit admin (/u/raldi)
  - Strom 10y ago
    Blind trust in such a simply verifiable case is quite naive. You can easily open up the front page of HN as a logged in user and see that it contains information about which storeies you've voted for and which you've flagged. On top of that, you can click "hide" to hide stories. These will only be hidden for your specific account, not for every person who loads the front page. What's more, the go-to call-to-action by HN admins during really popular stories is to have people log out, because logged in users don't get cached results. Have a look at the comment by HN admin dang on the Trump winning story. [1] The key part being "please log out to read HN today, unless you want to comment. Then we can serve you from cache". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
    - justinlaster 10y ago
      That's not the same thing as showing different results per user. It's just tacking on the user's operations when it renders out the front page. They're two completely different operations, with completely different complexities behind them. The "hide" feature is not analogous to what reddit is doing.
      - raldi 10y ago
        Exactly. It's the difference between "Look up the first 100 people in this phone book not named Justin" and "Look up the 100 Justins that come first alphabetically across these 100 phone books"
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Okay; but that's just looking up the current vote stats on the same set of stories that would be displayed to anyone at that time. When I go to reddit.com, I see a list of stories from subreddits I've personally selected.
  - Strom 10y ago
    Not necessarily true. HN has a "hide" feature for example, and if you hide some stories you will get a different top 30.
    - sgift 10y ago
      As far as I know hide doesn't change the order, it just skips some results. This is a far simpler problem than merging multiple sources of information into one result.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xapata 10y ago
So, approximate. Don't make the calculation exact. No one will care if the page is mostly correct, since the algorithm you've created is already just a proxy for relevance instead of actual relevance.
twhb 10y ago
The perf problems referenced are in front end not back. reddit's mobile website really does have terrible performance, resulting from a whole list of mistakes. Paul Irish did a study - https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  It's hard to blame them for missing the point when the comment is kind of nonsense in the first place. It's a false dichotomy. Even if it wasn't and you had to choose one or the other the choice isn't clear cut since the backend improvements benefit the desktop site, mobile site and the mobile app. To be totally honest I'd say the comment is verging on toxicity. They're basically telling these backend engineers to piss off and save the blog post until the mobile site loads faster. It's quite likely they have little-to-no control over the mobile site and caching improvements are one of the few indirect ways they can improve it. This exactly the opposite of what we should see in response to content like this.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    > They're basically telling these backend engineers to piss off and save the blog post until the mobile site loads faster That's not really what I'm going for. The way they framed the blogpost just lacks perspective. Perhaps that's due to organizational structure, but maybe there's a lesson in that too. I am a little disappointed I ended up as the top comment. The technical comments are more interesting. The upvotes on my comment probably just represent frustration.
- flukus 10y ago
  So much effort when they could have just put some mobile lipstick on the desktop site and been fine.
  - geon 10y ago
    Seriously. I use the desktop site on mobile.
35bge57dtjku 10y ago
And you could literally NOT update everything every single vote, and the users wouldn't even know... That's one of the major points of all those queues reddit uses, isn't it?

by raldi 10y ago

swsieber 10y ago

False. It cannot since it has too look up the vote status for (logged in users).

choward 10y ago
What?
flashman 10y ago
I dunno man, I think I'm going to trust the former Reddit admin (/u/raldi)
- Strom 10y ago
  Blind trust in such a simply verifiable case is quite naive. You can easily open up the front page of HN as a logged in user and see that it contains information about which storeies you've voted for and which you've flagged. On top of that, you can click "hide" to hide stories. These will only be hidden for your specific account, not for every person who loads the front page. What's more, the go-to call-to-action by HN admins during really popular stories is to have people log out, because logged in users don't get cached results. Have a look at the comment by HN admin dang on the Trump winning story. [1] The key part being "please log out to read HN today, unless you want to comment. Then we can serve you from cache". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
  - justinlaster 10y ago
    That's not the same thing as showing different results per user. It's just tacking on the user's operations when it renders out the front page. They're two completely different operations, with completely different complexities behind them. The "hide" feature is not analogous to what reddit is doing.
    - raldi 10y ago
      Exactly. It's the difference between "Look up the first 100 people in this phone book not named Justin" and "Look up the 100 Justins that come first alphabetically across these 100 phone books"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Okay; but that's just looking up the current vote stats on the same set of stories that would be displayed to anyone at that time. When I go to reddit.com, I see a list of stories from subreddits I've personally selected.
- Strom 10y ago
  Not necessarily true. HN has a "hide" feature for example, and if you hide some stories you will get a different top 30.
  - sgift 10y ago
    As far as I know hide doesn't change the order, it just skips some results. This is a far simpler problem than merging multiple sources of information into one result.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xapata 10y ago

So, approximate. Don't make the calculation exact. No one will care if the page is mostly correct, since the algorithm you've created is already just a proxy for relevance instead of actual relevance.

twhb 10y ago

The perf problems referenced are in front end not back. reddit's mobile website really does have terrible performance, resulting from a whole list of mistakes. Paul Irish did a study - https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
It's hard to blame them for missing the point when the comment is kind of nonsense in the first place. It's a false dichotomy. Even if it wasn't and you had to choose one or the other the choice isn't clear cut since the backend improvements benefit the desktop site, mobile site and the mobile app. To be totally honest I'd say the comment is verging on toxicity. They're basically telling these backend engineers to piss off and save the blog post until the mobile site loads faster. It's quite likely they have little-to-no control over the mobile site and caching improvements are one of the few indirect ways they can improve it. This exactly the opposite of what we should see in response to content like this.
- slavik81 10y ago
  > They're basically telling these backend engineers to piss off and save the blog post until the mobile site loads faster That's not really what I'm going for. The way they framed the blogpost just lacks perspective. Perhaps that's due to organizational structure, but maybe there's a lesson in that too. I am a little disappointed I ended up as the top comment. The technical comments are more interesting. The upvotes on my comment probably just represent frustration.
flukus 10y ago
So much effort when they could have just put some mobile lipstick on the desktop site and been fine.
- geon 10y ago
  Seriously. I use the desktop site on mobile.

35bge57dtjku 10y ago

And you could literally NOT update everything every single vote, and the users wouldn't even know... That's one of the major points of all those queues reddit uses, isn't it?