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Why is this on the front page when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14519343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14519343 has more upvotes?
by falsedan 9y ago
Why is this on the front page when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14519343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14519343 has more upvotes?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBecause HN frontpage is Magic™. A rumour between the wizards has it that the frontpage spell takes into account the first derivative of upvotes, among other things.
- ColinWright 9y agoI have no official position and no inside information. Here are my observations. There are a number of things that happen that people are not always aware of. There is, for example, a "flame-war" detector, that works on the heuristic that if there are more comments than points then it's probably a smaller number of people having a back'n'forth, so it's likely to be unproductive/unenlightening. It's a heuristic, but it works well enough to be a good first approximation. But these things are watched and reviewed by the mods. They can remove that penalty if it seems to be a false positive. They can also apply a boost to items they think are good material for HN, but which haven't got the attention they deserve. Looking at the traces[0][1] I suspect that this item has had a boost, and the other has had the flame-war penalty. [0] http://hnrankings.info/14517461/ http://hnrankings.info/14517461/ [1] http://hnrankings.info/14519343/ http://hnrankings.info/14519343/