19 ms·
Most-favorited Hacker News posts
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asutekku 6y agoHonestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.
- tidenly 6y agoI honestly never even noticed it was a feature until you just mentioned it here.
- have_faith 6y agoDitto, I didn't ever notice it and I've been on here for years.
- gambiting 6y agoI'm on 10k+ karma and I literally didn't know it existed.
- CydeWeys 6y ago20k+ karma here and same. I haven't favorited so much as a single article. Didn't realize it was an option. So the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI've noticed these and that's probably only because I trained myself to look carefully at stuff (that was a lot of work too). Small, light grey font on a beige background, well, what did HN expect.
- CydeWeys 6y agoYeah, that's a separate but related issue: HN's UI is too low contrast to the point of posing an accessibility issue. It kind of tells you everything you need to know about YCombinator (and maybe SV VC in general) that its biggest watering hole doesn't make even this basic concession towards accessibility.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI agree but HN does work rather well without JS enabled, so credit where credit's due.
- LandR 6y agoIf you click on the time bit '14 minutes ago' in a users comment you go to a page where you can favourite individual comments too.
- JackFr 6y agoWhoa!
- bovermyer 6y agoI'm in the same boat. Even knowing it's there now, I have to look hard for it; there's no visual anchor to draw my eye there.
- dhimes 6y agoI've seen it there for years but have no idea what it does. I don't really care-I bookmark things I like.
- fluffything 6y agoI use the mobile app and its horrible. I can't often save comments, i can't see my comment threads, ... There are probably many HN features nobody knows about because the UI doesn't expose them.
- asutekku 6y agoWhy are you not using the website? It works really well on mobile and loads almost instantly. I’ve never seen a reason to use app for HN.
- NextHendrix 6y agoMy only issue with the website is the little minimize "-" sign on comments is too small and difficult to reliably hit without zooming in. However as you say everything else works much more smoothly than any of the apps I've tried
- cgriswald 6y agoI only ever use private browsing and don’t want to have to log in every time I want to upvote someone. The content is saved unless I explicitly reload or navigate away from the content. So I can close the app and come back to exactly where I was rather than the browser that will not save that state and then try to reload even if I don’t have an internet connection. Navigation is easier in the app, because every action is clicking anywhere on the post and selecting an action from a large pop up menu. Except for collapsing/expanding which is also easier because you click the post header not just a tiny dash. Automatic dark/light mode. Etc. Etc. The app I use isn’t perfect but it’s preferable for lots of reasons to visiting the site directly.
- ludocode 6y agoI also only use private browsing mode, but the login annoyance is not enough to make me use an app. Most apps in fact track like crazy (potentially even third-party apps for sites like HN), and the whole point of private browsing is to not be tracked. Instead I just lurk most of the time since I'm too lazy to log in, which means I'm not really contributing with votes. Maybe what we need to do is reduce the friction in logging in. I've always turned off the browser's password saving features and use my own password manager; maybe I should reconsider that policy. [edit] Nevermind, apparently Firefox can't remember passwords when in permanent private browsing mode. So much for that idea :/
- qntmfred 6y agoBetter imo to use a bookmarking service that works across the entire web. I used to save facebook links and bookmark tweets too because the features were in those platforms, but eventually I just started using Pocket like I use for everything else on the web.
- ponker 6y agoWhy would I let my bookmarks get trapped inside the site owner’s database?
- kodablah 6y agoBecause "stories" (i.e. top-level posts) are easily searched and retrieved. Individual comments however might have more value being favorited, and while the numbers are likely similarly low, they would make for a better blog post.
- bad_user 6y agoThat's because I already have bookmarks in my browser, marking articles as favorite on HN would give me no value.
- amelius 6y agoI download the articles, so I can even read them in the event they are taken offline.
- zimpenfish 6y agoI use Pocket which then gets IFTTT'd to Pinboard which archives them for me.
- ekianjo 6y agoHN Comments is where the money is, not the stories themselves.
- bad_user 6y agoComments have links that can be bookmarked too, under that timestamp, here's yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352253
- grugagag 6y agoI didn't know that comments can be bookmarked, that's a very unusual and neat feature
- remram 6y agoUnusual? Reddit and Twitter have it, GitHub/GitLab have anchors too, which platform lacks comment links?
- ekianjo 6y agoI usually favorite a whole story so that I have access to all comments, not just one.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y agoThese days most people don’t use Internet Explorer.
- refresher 6y agoI use it pretty often. There are stories, show HN apps, or just random coding things that I feel I may want to have access to in the future, but are in a domain don't have enough of an interest in to bookmark. I guess if I had a generic "misc." bookmark folder that I didn't care to organize it would go here but I like keeping browser bookmarks minimal.
- raverbashing 6y agoOn that note, if there's a feature that I would like to see implemented on HN is that favoriting an article shouldn't redirect to the favorites page, instead just working with AJAX (do people still use that term?)
- lazyjones 6y agoIt's lower than it could be since only the most recent 30 favourites of the top 10k members are included. But still lower than expected.
- raxxorrax 6y agoI don't use it and use bookmarks instead, but if you just look for points https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ works pretty well. Spoiler: Steven Hawking has died.
- weinzierl 6y agoNot really surprised anymore because this has been discussed in the past but still perplexed why this is the case. I use the feature intensively and I find it useful. UX could be improved though, especially I'd like to be able to favorite a comment with a single click/tap, very much like voting up or down.
- Someone 6y agoYou may use it intensively, but as far as I can tell, you have only 27 favorites at the moment (https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=weinzierl https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=weinzierl) I guess there also are a lot more stories (over 24 million, it seems) than regular users. Even taking your 27 as the average per user, I would expect the average number of time an article gets favored to be significantly below 1.
- weinzierl 6y agoIndeed I do have hundreds of favorites, going back till 2012. What you are looking at are just my favorited stories, but I have a lot more favorite comments. Funnily your comment kind of supports my point that the UX could be improved;-) Also a disclaimer for those looking at my favorites: I use this feature much like a bookmarking service and for me a favorite means an endorsement only in the sense that I found the contribution interesting and valuable enough to be remembered. I don't necessarily agree with what is said in the postings I favorite.
- Someone 6y agoAha! Thanks. The UI can be improved, yes.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoOne thing I wish were possible is to search through upvoted content and favorited content by title and even comments in either. I have upvoted so much stuff a lot of it becomes harder to find if I cant narrow it down by what is relevant to me. Its the one killer feature HN is missing for me. Outside of that one thing I think HN is perfect thus far. Mostly the favorites feature is used by me when I cant upvote something since thats what HN defaults to. I would use it more often if I could filter by my own saved content.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoUnless I'm mistaken, HN exposes that data so anyone can build those features as either a browser add-on or as a separate site built on the data? One of the things I super appreciate about HN is the (almost) complete abcense of feature creep.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI don't think I've ever seen this on any third party search tools for HN. If it's an actual feature it is highly under documented. The filtering that HN does is on all comments / stories (by post title) but you don't get to filter down by what a user has upvoted since that data is private to the user, only favorited data is public. I don't think this is a feature creep, I think it's useful. Otherwise I'm going to have to code something to scrape through HN for me and provide that additional context, and even then I still would be missing a way to filter down on HN comment data vs my own local db of upvoted materials.
- gabrielsroka 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353526
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoOh, sorry, I didn't read / comprehend your comment properly earlier. Firstly, try contacting hn@ycombinator.com detailing what you'd like to build and see if they're interested / able to collaborate or provide you the necessary access / APIs. I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but have contacted the mods from time to time and found them eminently approachable. Secondly, if you can't see the up or down vote buttons, try clicking on a comment or submissions time stamp immediately after the username. For reasons I don't know sometimes the vote buttons aren't displayed in the regular view.
- adwww 6y agoSeems pretty silly that you can only favourite the comments view - if you click directly into the article from HN homepage you never see the favourite link at all.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoMaybe people tend to favorite different things. I favorite things from time to time, but don't recall favoriting anything in this list.
- harperlee 6y agoWow. Abismal number. I dreamt a side project of using that info to estimate “taste distance” between users and see what personalized recommendations come out of it, but I dont think it would work with those numbers.
- JackFr 6y agoOn the site since 2012. Never noticed favorite until right now. Was surprised to see I had 3 favorites saved already which all must have been inadvertent clicks.
- m12k 6y agoI have another tool (Pocket) that I use for bookmarking interesting posts for later reading/reference that works independently of which site I happen to be on.
- KrishnaAnaril 6y agoAnother hidden feature is 'top links'(https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best). It is not visible to me (may be because of low karma), but if I directly type it in the url it works.
- krapp 6y agoIt's hidden behind "Lists" in the site footer along with some other pages.
- KrishnaAnaril 6y agoThank You. I wasn't aware of that section.
- wrsh07 6y agoA lot of people have pointed out alternatives, but the killer feature of eg bookmarks (or maybe pocket?) is the categorization. I have bookmarks that I've planned to review in 3 months. I'll have bookmarks for a tool I plan to try out on a future side project I don't really care about the "how" (I take notes for various things -- books, movies, apps -- all over the place). But bookmarks are convenient and allow for the simplest of categorization, which I value
- mindcrime 6y agomore people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark Why would you, when upvoting achieves the same effect and is available with one less click? If you could "favorite" an itme from the front page then I expect the feature would get more use.
- remram 6y agoWhy would I use this instead of my browser's bookmarks, which have tags, folders, and search, and are less likely to be discontinued by the product storing them?
- recursive 6y agoFor me, the answer is that my browser bookmarks are tied to a physical machine and specific browser. I use many machines, and sometimes many different browsers on each.
- stephenitis 6y agoYeah I never noticed it
- jagged-chisel 6y agoThis is exactly my use case.
- dang 6y agoThose numbers are so low because the user list was truncated, and then restricted only to 30 per user. The globally most-favorited is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418 ("Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?") with 836 faves. You can see the global top 50 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617
- jolmg 6y agoBesides being tied to your account, the only plus I see of HN bookmarks over browser bookmarks is that your HN bookmarks are shared with the public. Some people may want to keep their favorites private, though.
- 1f60c 6y agoWhere can you find the list of most active Hacker News users?
- nkurz 6y agoIt depends on how you define "active", but if you click on the Lists link at the bottom of this page, and then on Leaders, you find an ordered list of the users with the most points: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoHN's hall of shame.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tlarkworthy 6y agoI used BigQuery public dataset. I scored active as the quantity of comments https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 6y agoOf course now this post will become the most favorited HN post of all time. I certainly marked it and reminded myself to use that feature more often.
- interrupt_ 6y agoI use the favorites feature as a kind of "read later" list (which I never do).
- wombatmobile 6y agoHow many HN members are there? Is any data available on their locations? Demographics?
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoIt might be embarrassing to admit but I use 'threads' as my bookmark service - if something was engaging/striking/funny enough for me to comment on, then I want to come back to it. At some point I will write a thingy to go grab all my old comments but for now HN is more useful to me than pocket / delicious etc. It turns out to be a useful heuristic - the mental process that says "I should store that for later" fails far more often than "that is something I have something vaguely useful to say about".
- alexmingoia 6y agoWhy use website-specific favorites instead of browser favorites? Isn’t it inconvenient to have bookmarks siloed across different websites? My browser bookmarks work on any website, are synced across devices and backed up automatically (Safari), and are easily searchable and organized via folders or tags.
- kohtatsu 6y agoI use it as a super-upvote. I try to only favourite the cream of the crop, in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them. I mostly favourite comments not submissions though.
- yorwba 6y ago> in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them. I did. Thank you!
- pc86 6y agoThe only benefit is that the HN favorites are public (to HN) so you can get aggregate data like this. For the individual user there is zero reason.
- steelcm 6y agoTIL HN has favorite functionality!
- ekianjo 6y agoNot very useful since almost no-one uses the favorite function on HN.
- vincnetas 6y agoI'm using. Author could do a query of number of fave'd items distribution across HN readers.
- pc86 6y agoAs evidenced by the top favorite among the 10,000 most active users having less than 100, when it's over four years old and has nearly 1700 upvotes.
- dang 6y ago"Most active" in this case means "posting the most comments". That's an interesting subset to look at but there's no reason it would be correlated with heavy use of the favorites feature.
- ekianjo 6y agoI agree, the majority of people who visit content aggregators tend to be readers, not commenters, and therefore there is no necessary correlation between commenting and bookmarking.
- dang 6y ago68k users have used the favorite feature, on 1.7M posts. It's not widely used by HN standards, but that's certainly not "almost no-one". You can also gauge it by how many people rushed to this thread to post "please don't remove the feature" when someone mentioned we had thought about removing it.
- ekianjo 6y agoFollow up questions when you want to measure adoption: - 68k users out of how many users on HN? This is the metric that really matters when you want to consider how wide the adoption is. - Number of users may not be very easy to evaluate as there's throwaway accounts, inactive accounts and the like, so ideally you would need to account for the people who log on at least once every month or something. - Among those, you would need to filter those who actually use the feature regularly vs the ones who just used the feature once and never used it again. Look like the average is at 25 per user based on the data you provided, but I am guessing there are users with 100s of favorites so that means there are people at the end of the tail as well, with just a few, which should not be counted as "active favorite users". By the way @dang, is there any hidden function on HN to see some HN related stats?
- whereistimbo 6y agoI did use favorite features often for both submission and comments.
- bbx 6y agoSurprised to see my project at the top, considering how old it is. Also surprised by the very low number of favorites overall; I use that feature quite often.
- sunil_mohanty 6y agoIt would be nice to have the feature action on the home page itself.
- bottled_poe 6y agoPossible selection bias here - How long has the favourite feature been available in its current form?
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
- tlarkworthy 6y agoThe fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning resources were the most useful thing to me. I have seen most of those links whoosh by me when reading HN, but this list has made me revisit some of them that were lost to the sands of time. In particular the bash shell resource [1] is something I have been trying to re-find for ages! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596
- jacquesm 6y agoHidden? They're in plain sight at the top of every article page.
- tlarkworthy 6y agoSee other comments. Maybe higher friction would be a better phrase
- spicymaki 6y agoThe favorite feature is hidden in plain sight.
- avree 6y agoI've used this website since 2010 and just realized it was a feature. Maybe I'm just unobservant...
- narag 6y agoIt's relatively new. Before we used upvotes. Actually I still don't use it and keep using upvotes to favourite stories. I'm sorry for that and even worse: sometimes I upvote a story without following the link, just using the upvote as a "read later" bookmark because I found the title intriguing. Not so bad is when I upvote because there's a very interesting comment, even though the article itself is crappy. Time ago someone posted a script that collects upvoted stories, but I can't find it now, it's in one of those upvoted stories O:) I guess I could make a conversion... but there are probably more than a thousand upvoted stories, I don't know.
- vishnuharidas 6y agoWhat are the most upvoted HN posts of all time?
- saadalem 6y agoThat is very good, if only a HN-lore exist, there are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them. Great stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc.. create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.
- zachromorp 6y agoI will fav this post, so your list will have a chance to be recursively reachable.
- mudlus 6y agoWas just thinking this as I liked it.
- dgfitz 6y agoI find it amusing that the #19 on this is flagged dead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amai 6y agoI think this list is more useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- codethief 6y agoThanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to have a look at the most popular posts.
- tlarkworthy 6y agoThere is a best link https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
- surround 6y agoWhat about most favorited comments?
- smnscu 6y agoFools. They could've only "favourited" this post taps temple.
- sn41 6y agoClicking on the timestamp to get to a comment so that I can favorite it, is not that intuitive either.
- danso 6y agoI've occasionally looked at the favorites of highly active users (e.g. the list of karma leaders), and I've rarely found other users to have used the feature. As for me, I love using it – it has the right amount of friction such that I only end up using it for things that really are my favorite. I never look through my own upvote history. But whenever I need to find something that I remember being great, it's almost always in my favorites list.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoMy only complaint with the favorite feature is that after favoriting, it takes you to your favorites page, versus an async request leaving you in place with the comment or post favorited.
- dang 6y agoThat's on my list to change. It'll work like voting does.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIt's appreciated.
- danso 6y agoThat's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in using it. I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.
- dang 6y agoIt was intentional, but the intention was feature discovery. We did it that way in the hope that people would get to know the favorites page and start browsing the favorites of others. It doesn't seem to have had that effect; it's just a pain. I suppose we could put up a confirmation screen first: "Do you want to add 'foo' to your favorites?" But that might just be a pain too. There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature: the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I considered removing it. Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users. We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so on.
- CamelCaseName 6y agoI was surprised to learn that I wasn't using the favorite feature! I primarily browse HN through the Android app "Materialistic", which has a prominent "save" button at the top of each story. However, those saved stories (~1.1/week) aren't favorited. Just saved locally. Could this be part of why the feature seems so rarely used?
- incrimintal 6y agoHN's most hidden feature is if you say anything that doesn't align with the mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you for flaimbait.
- gabrielsroka 6y agoI wrote some JavaScript and Python tools to search your HN Favorites and export them to CSV or HTML. The JavaScript runs in your browser like a browser extension. It scrapes the HTML and navigates from page to page. Setup and usage instructions are in the files. JavaScript: https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.js https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/... Python: https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.py https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/... Previous discussion, other tools and more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236
- geerlingguy 6y agoI... never knew “favorite” was a feature on hacker news until I read this post. Now I see the “favorite” link right above this comment form. I guess I never even noticed the links on the post page are different than when browsing stories on the front page. Now I’m noticing there’s also a “hide” link!
- wsc981 6y agoI never knew about the favorite “button” as well. I think the “button” might be more clear if a unicode “heart” was used instead.
- geerlingguy 6y agoAnd elsewhere in this thread, I also discovered you can favorite comments too (by clicking on the timestamp to get to the permalink page for the comment).
- redisman 6y agoEveryone favorite this post so we'll get an infinite loop.
- snowwrestler 6y agoThis is cool. I think it would be helpful if the list showed the date of each post as well. That’s an important signal for me when deciding which links to explore in a curated list.
- andersco 6y agoWhen I saw “favorited” I thought that was referring to what I guess is “upvoted” - as others have mentioned, I didn’t even realize that was a feature. Is there a list of most upvoted HN stories of all time?
- plibither8 6y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?q= https://hn.algolia.com/?q=
- ColanR 6y agoNotice that the 19th most favorited post is also flagged. ("Those People We Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together"). To me, that indicates the flagging mechanism on hn is broken.
- krapp 6y agoHave you actually read that thread? It's a garbage fire. To me, flagging worked as intended.
- ColanR 6y agoApparently quite a lot of HNers disagree with you, and liked it well enough to save it. That should be enough to indicate the article is appropriate for hn.
- krapp 6y agoAnd the low quality of discussion it produced and the number of flagged comments should be enough to indicate that it wasn't. Because people don't just flag for the article, they flag for the thread as well.
- ColanR 6y agoThen the comments should be flagged, not the article. There wasn't anything wrong with the article, and apparently it was interesting to the hn crowd - which according to the guidelines is exactly what makes it acceptable. EDIT: to respond to your edit, there was an entire thread discussing this in the article discussion. The article should be flagged if there's a problem with the article, and comments should be flagged if there's a problem with the comments.
- sbr464 6y agoI made this for scraping favorites a while back. https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api
- nicwest 6y agoI think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.
- lithos 6y agoIt's interesting how few favorites the articles actually have.
- dang 6y agoThose numbers are artificially low. If you want to compare the global list it's at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617.
- owenversteeg 6y agoI personally find the comments far more interesting than the stories. Does anyone know some HN users with interesting favorited comments? If anyone thinks the list of posts here is very heavy on programming things, feel free to browse my favorited comments. I have quite the mix of all topics. The usual disclaimer applies - these are just my HN favorites, I do not endorse them. Many favorited comments are completely wrong, they are not medical, legal or financial advice, I am not licensed to sell insurance etc etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comments=t https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comme...
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoIs it possible to favorite a comment on HN?
- nyanpasu64 6y agoOnly once you click a comment's date to access the permalink.
- non-entity 6y agoYes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of actions.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoAh, nice. Thanks.
- heimatau 6y agoI didn't know that. This was very helpful. Been here for a while too (a few years passive read prior to making an account).
- reaperducer 6y agoYes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of actions. Very interesting, after the very active recent discussion about discoverability in user interfaces. It's like HN hired someone from the iOS design team to come up with the notion of "timestamp" = "favorite."
- btilly 6y agoInterestingly, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740 is both on this list and flagged. Apparently people have very strong and diametrically opposed opinions on cancel culture, leading to a lot of flagging and a lot of favoriting of the same article.
- coding123 6y agoI just learned a few things about music and synth and CSS because of this. Also, going to favorite THIS post.
- dang 6y agoThe OP says "The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members." How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists. I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable: 836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? 783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? 685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics? 581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? 554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour? 510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations? 510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi? 506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer? 472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to 470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before? 463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview 461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects? 454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life 448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners 447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner 444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science 441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012) 439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team 439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it 432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course 425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time 422 22310813 Gears 421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) 416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations 409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model 409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? 406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] 398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams? 396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers? 381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson 374 21536789 Build Your Own React 372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise? 369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project? 366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education 365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions 364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill 363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file 360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020? 360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project? 358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? 358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website? 356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into 356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017) 355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016) 355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning? 353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking 353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade? 352 20254057 Startup idea checklist 347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube? 347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
- gumby 6y agoThe list will be inherently biased for recency (note that “Ursula LeGuin has died” is high on the list) simply because there are more people around to vote. Doesn’t make the list meaningless, but it may not surface the “best” articles that might interest you.
- dang 6y agoI posted the global list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617
- njsubedi 6y agoI don’t fav any posts that I like, but upvote them. I also up upvote the ones I want to bookmark, so that I can later come back to read more comments. I don’t really understand why I would need to fav a post.
- gorgoiler 6y agoclicks favourite Maybe if the favouriteness could be transitive in some way? It could be called “favouriterank” and we could use it to index the web and surface the best pages when people search for things they are interested in?
- dang 6y agoThe original intention of the feature was to try to derive some interesting signal from collective usage (that's why HN favorites are public) so that's an interesting suggestion.
- gorgoiler 6y agoI confess: I didn’t write it in a particularly serious tone (pfff, “favouriterank” indeed — a comparison to the early days of a pre-monetized google.com) but behind it was a serious idea. I appreciate the charitable response.
- FillardMillmore 6y agoI quite like the favorite feature. I did not know until reading this post though that you could favorite comments as well - I'll be sure to utilize that in the future. Others have mentioned that the favorite feature is of little utility because they are using other bookmarking software (browser/browser extensions, etc.). I would say, personally, that I still love the favorite feature on HN because my typical collection of bookmarks contains a whole variety of things - history, politics, music, self-help stuff, etc. The stuff I read and favorite on HN are of an entirely different set of information and curiosity and thus, I really do find it useful to have them all collected in one convenient location.
- andreisbc 6y agoWow, I've been lurking HN for years and I had never noticed or used the "favourite" button before
- stormdennis 6y agoWhat's amazed me down the years is where some random user will reveal they are the developer behind some well known software, or the author of a famous book etc. Then when you look at their profile you'll see that they've been a member for years but only have a small amount of karma.
- teleforce 6y agoThanks to the poster and the slidedeck's writer, I have finally convinced and managed to read the Machine Learning 101 slidedeck [1]. I'd recommend you guys to read it as well, very informative reading. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115
- stOneskull 6y agoexodus movement of jah people
- amelius 6y agoI'd like to see collaborative filtering applied to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
- dang 6y agoYou mean "people who favorited X also favorited Y"? That could be interesting. Not sure there's enough data.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]