6 ms·

Show HN: Hacker News Outliers

147 points by 7moritz7 3y ago

I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.

andrewfromx 3y ago
if you like this you gotta try https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest They are amazing. A collection of single vote items. Future 500+ ones yet to be found.
Handprint4469 3y ago
For those of us who prefer RSS feeds, you can get the exact same thing using this URL: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=500 https://hnrss.org/newest?points=500 (thanks to the guys at https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/, who offer multiple customizable RSS feeds for HN)
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Can also be achieved using algolia, with the search "points>500" and then sorted by date, also available as a json API. (that's what hnrss uses) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=points%3E500&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
nileshjadhav 3y ago
[flagged]
airstrike 3y ago
Congrats on building it and putting it out there, it looks really slick I do have to say I think you'll miss out on a lot of what makes HN great if you only read those "main" articles
m1117 3y ago
[flagged]
mcslambley 3y ago
Browsing on mobile, I think it would provide a better user experience to open links in the same tab.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Yup, if I want a new tab I can middle-click, or long-click, or whatever. At best this is just arrogance from the website developer thinking they know best.
  - 7moritz7 3y ago
    It's personal preference. I can write it however I want and you can decide to use it or not.
spacecadet 3y ago
Submission embeddings?
uKVZe85V 3y ago
> The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage Well, for one HN works without Javascript, while that URL yields just a blank page.
- 7moritz7 3y ago
  Whole different story but do we really have to insist on not delivering any first party frontend logic in 2024? It's minimal and most code is on the server. Also it's a small footprint and proven to be fast (Preact). This site has a 100 performance score on Google Pagespeed, JS doesn't mean bad UX. Blocking third party scripts and cookies is one thing, but not wanting first party script just forces the developer to use server-side templating for their static content which means you either deliver everything from the same origin (bad for latency) or chain a CDN in front that picks out static content to cache (I don't think that's compatible with the web 2.0 ideology). So it's not ideal too
  - david_draco 3y ago
    > Whole different story but do we really have to insist on not delivering any first party frontend logic in 2024? Yes. Not all users may be able-bodied, or humans.
    - joshmanders 3y ago
      Crazy you think that robots and screen assistant tools can't execute JavaScript. Googlebot has been able to do this for well over a decade. Time to get out of 2001 era thinking.
  - MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
    It's a super weird phenomenon. These people (who are mostly not web developers) have enough of a technical understanding of how websites work to disable a huge part of the browser, that they think shouldn't be needed, and then complain about websites not working. From a web developer's perspective, it doesn't make any sense to me because JS is just one part of the web standard. If you're not going to support it, then why do you expect any websites to work? It's like if I deleted gcc from a linux machine and then tried to build a package, and then complained that it wasn't building, because "it shouldn't use C." Well, C is an expected part of the operating system and so the package author has decided to use it. You've broken your system.
SuperHeavy256 3y ago
How is this "outliers"? These are just the submissions that are really popular
- mgfist 3y ago
  Posts with more than 500 upvotes are rare, therefore making them outliers.
  - sodapopcan 3y ago
    While technically correct, is this really how "outliers" is generally used? I tend to think of it as "the forgotten few," not "the select few."
    - 7moritz7 3y ago
      Yes, in statistics when something is noticeably detached from most that's an outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier
      - sodapopcan 3y ago
        Ah ya, of course, which of course is appropriate here. I was thinking of it in a social context... which is actually also somewhat appropriate here, but likely less so.
blopp99 3y ago
If this post reaches the list would be a cool inception.
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  From my experience and seeing the patterns on Hacker News, this won't. The comment sentiments are a mix already with negativity already going south pretty fast. I feel like this might fall off before hitting 100. Edit/Update: My bad. 100, it is. :-)
  - ayewo 3y ago
    I came back to check on your prediction and it turns out you were wrong :) Currently at 107 points and of course still on the front page (at #24).
    - Brajeshwar 3y ago
      Yes, you are right, I got it wrong by about a-third.
      - 7moritz7 3y ago
        By 50 %
Jun8 3y ago
When I scan for outlier submissions on the front page I look for: * Submissions for high comment number to vote ratio. This sometimes means it’s a submission with a political bent, leading to flame wars; you can easily tell this by the title. However, sometimes this ratio is high for unexpected submissions, I check these to see what the discussion is about. * Submissions that are voted to first page with, say, >20 votes, but have either no comments or a single comment. These are usually are topics that people unanimously agree with nothing much to say. These are relatively rare, I’d say maybe once or twice a month but are interesting.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  > Submissions that are voted to first page with, say, >20 votes, but have either no comments or a single comment. [...] These are relatively rare [...] Curiously enough, there's one just like that on the frontpage now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39419195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39419195
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Some of us upvote to read later and I think if the title's interesting enough, you'll get those upvotes.
diggan 3y ago
Seems to be working more or less like https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best except in different order + different UI
austin-cheney 3y ago
I often find the comments more interesting than many of the linked submissions. It would be nice if there were an outliers list of comments showing comments upvoted more than 25 and more than 50% of the linked submission's up votes.
- lukan 3y ago
  That is sadly not possible, as the API (intentionally) does not give you the number of upvotes for a comment. Only for the whole article.
hubraumhugo 3y ago
Lots of cool stuff to do with HN data! I'm just finishing a blog post about the most discussed topics on Hacker News after analyzing and categorizing all front-page posts: https://www.kadoa.com/blog/top-trends-on-hacker-news https://www.kadoa.com/blog/top-trends-on-hacker-news
tiffanyh 3y ago
HN Best? How is this meaningful different than /best https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
- 7moritz7 3y ago
  It doesn't use a ranking algorithm and just gives you anything over the threshhold in the chronological order. Best is similar but to catch up quickly I find this basic implementation more approachable
wslh 3y ago
I don't know if I will, formally, title this as HN Outliers. It is more like a ranking. Using the outliers word alone has many different meanings.
- dsizzle 3y ago
  Not really a ranking either (it's ordered chronologically e.g.), but true it is a very specific form of outlier, and not what I expected based on the name.
  - giancarlostoro 3y ago
    I was expecting some clever way to find those stories worth reading but that did not make the cut somehow.
- PsylentKnight 3y ago
  I suspect OP was going for something along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's usage of "outliers" (unusually successful people)
HackerHG 3y ago
As an aside, the UI looks really clean and easier on eyes (default dark theme + I find the usual dark themes tend to have bad contrast choices). I wonder if something similar is available to browse hacker news in general.
- geor9e 3y ago
  RSS readers have dark mode. I use Feedbro personally.
JustinGoldberg9 3y ago
bitcoin
divbzero 3y ago
Two related, though not quite identical, lists provided by HN are: https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500 https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500
pmontra 3y ago
Maybe dates in yyyy-mm-dd so non US users won't be tricked by 03/01/2024? Or this could be one of those rare places where today, yesterday and 2 days ago would be appropriate. But then, when does today starts? HN time zone (Pacific time?)
WXLCKNO 3y ago
I was building something like this for personal use but for Reddit to beat my reddit addiction (before they fucked up their API). I called it Detox for Reddit and you could connect your reddit account to get your subreddits and then it would check distribution of scores for that subreddit and only send you the really good stuff in a daily digest e-mail. The idea was that it would prevent the FOMO that made me check Reddit more often to avoid missing the good stuff among the sludge. I wasn't planning on monetizing but monetization strategy would have been a limited number of subreddits (3-5) in a free version, all your subreddits in a small monthly subscription (like 1-2$) and then a larger fee to enable NSFW subreddits. If reddit allowed them, I would have advertised directly on reddit in ADHD and other relevant subreddits like Productivity etc. So I like your idea, I think it works as is but would be enhanced by having customizable thresholds or actual calculation of outliers so you can say give me the top 5% or 1% of posts.
- Recursing 3y ago
  The free Reddit API is generous enough for this use case. I think it allows about one call per second per API user. I made a Telegram bot very similar to what you described (but free since it's just a few lines of code) https://t.me/MySubredditsBot https://t.me/MySubredditsBot
vermarish 3y ago
I mean, instead of using a fixed threshold at 500, if you use a live threshold determined by the recent average upvotes, then yeah I'd have no qualms with calling them outliers. It's just that this method is susceptible to votecount inflation, a la Reddit from 2014 to 2024.
spiralganglion 3y ago
My preferred alt frontend for HN is https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com I use it in "Top 20" mode. It helps me keep up with the bigger stories just by checking in once a day. Loads super fast, has worked great for many years now.
Recursing 3y ago
I made a Telegram channel which does the same, with a 1000 threshold: https://t.me/top_of_hacker_news https://t.me/top_of_hacker_news
mistermann 3y ago
An interesting added metric/filter would be posts that hit the front-page but then shortly after still exist on the site but are not available via navigating "next" from the main page.
vakmanIn 3y ago
I use https://flutterhackernews.web.app/ https://flutterhackernews.web.app/ for top, best, new stories.
histories 3y ago
I like https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/

147 points by 7moritz7 3y ago

andrewfromx 3y ago

if you like this you gotta try https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest They are amazing. A collection of single vote items. Future 500+ ones yet to be found.

Handprint4469 3y ago

For those of us who prefer RSS feeds, you can get the exact same thing using this URL: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=500 https://hnrss.org/newest?points=500 (thanks to the guys at https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/, who offer multiple customizable RSS feeds for HN)

SushiHippie 3y ago
Can also be achieved using algolia, with the search "points>500" and then sorted by date, also available as a json API. (that's what hnrss uses) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=points%3E500&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

nileshjadhav 3y ago

[flagged]

airstrike 3y ago

Congrats on building it and putting it out there, it looks really slick I do have to say I think you'll miss out on a lot of what makes HN great if you only read those "main" articles

m1117 3y ago

[flagged]

mcslambley 3y ago

Browsing on mobile, I think it would provide a better user experience to open links in the same tab.

ta1243 3y ago
Yup, if I want a new tab I can middle-click, or long-click, or whatever. At best this is just arrogance from the website developer thinking they know best.
- 7moritz7 3y ago
  It's personal preference. I can write it however I want and you can decide to use it or not.

spacecadet 3y ago

Submission embeddings?

uKVZe85V 3y ago

> The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage Well, for one HN works without Javascript, while that URL yields just a blank page.

7moritz7 3y ago
Whole different story but do we really have to insist on not delivering any first party frontend logic in 2024? It's minimal and most code is on the server. Also it's a small footprint and proven to be fast (Preact). This site has a 100 performance score on Google Pagespeed, JS doesn't mean bad UX. Blocking third party scripts and cookies is one thing, but not wanting first party script just forces the developer to use server-side templating for their static content which means you either deliver everything from the same origin (bad for latency) or chain a CDN in front that picks out static content to cache (I don't think that's compatible with the web 2.0 ideology). So it's not ideal too
- david_draco 3y ago
  > Whole different story but do we really have to insist on not delivering any first party frontend logic in 2024? Yes. Not all users may be able-bodied, or humans.
  - joshmanders 3y ago
    Crazy you think that robots and screen assistant tools can't execute JavaScript. Googlebot has been able to do this for well over a decade. Time to get out of 2001 era thinking.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  It's a super weird phenomenon. These people (who are mostly not web developers) have enough of a technical understanding of how websites work to disable a huge part of the browser, that they think shouldn't be needed, and then complain about websites not working. From a web developer's perspective, it doesn't make any sense to me because JS is just one part of the web standard. If you're not going to support it, then why do you expect any websites to work? It's like if I deleted gcc from a linux machine and then tried to build a package, and then complained that it wasn't building, because "it shouldn't use C." Well, C is an expected part of the operating system and so the package author has decided to use it. You've broken your system.

SuperHeavy256 3y ago

How is this "outliers"? These are just the submissions that are really popular

mgfist 3y ago
Posts with more than 500 upvotes are rare, therefore making them outliers.
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  While technically correct, is this really how "outliers" is generally used? I tend to think of it as "the forgotten few," not "the select few."
  - 7moritz7 3y ago
    Yes, in statistics when something is noticeably detached from most that's an outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier
    - sodapopcan 3y ago
      Ah ya, of course, which of course is appropriate here. I was thinking of it in a social context... which is actually also somewhat appropriate here, but likely less so.

blopp99 3y ago

If this post reaches the list would be a cool inception.

Brajeshwar 3y ago
From my experience and seeing the patterns on Hacker News, this won't. The comment sentiments are a mix already with negativity already going south pretty fast. I feel like this might fall off before hitting 100. Edit/Update: My bad. 100, it is. :-)
- ayewo 3y ago
  I came back to check on your prediction and it turns out you were wrong :) Currently at 107 points and of course still on the front page (at #24).
  - Brajeshwar 3y ago
    Yes, you are right, I got it wrong by about a-third.
    - 7moritz7 3y ago
      By 50 %

Jun8 3y ago

When I scan for outlier submissions on the front page I look for: * Submissions for high comment number to vote ratio. This sometimes means it’s a submission with a political bent, leading to flame wars; you can easily tell this by the title. However, sometimes this ratio is high for unexpected submissions, I check these to see what the discussion is about. * Submissions that are voted to first page with, say, >20 votes, but have either no comments or a single comment. These are usually are topics that people unanimously agree with nothing much to say. These are relatively rare, I’d say maybe once or twice a month but are interesting.

tentacleuno 3y ago
> Submissions that are voted to first page with, say, >20 votes, but have either no comments or a single comment. [...] These are relatively rare [...] Curiously enough, there's one just like that on the frontpage now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39419195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39419195
giancarlostoro 3y ago
Some of us upvote to read later and I think if the title's interesting enough, you'll get those upvotes.

diggan 3y ago

Seems to be working more or less like https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best except in different order + different UI

austin-cheney 3y ago

I often find the comments more interesting than many of the linked submissions. It would be nice if there were an outliers list of comments showing comments upvoted more than 25 and more than 50% of the linked submission's up votes.

lukan 3y ago
That is sadly not possible, as the API (intentionally) does not give you the number of upvotes for a comment. Only for the whole article.

hubraumhugo 3y ago

Lots of cool stuff to do with HN data! I'm just finishing a blog post about the most discussed topics on Hacker News after analyzing and categorizing all front-page posts: https://www.kadoa.com/blog/top-trends-on-hacker-news https://www.kadoa.com/blog/top-trends-on-hacker-news

tiffanyh 3y ago

HN Best? How is this meaningful different than /best https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best

7moritz7 3y ago
It doesn't use a ranking algorithm and just gives you anything over the threshhold in the chronological order. Best is similar but to catch up quickly I find this basic implementation more approachable

wslh 3y ago

I don't know if I will, formally, title this as HN Outliers. It is more like a ranking. Using the outliers word alone has many different meanings.

dsizzle 3y ago
Not really a ranking either (it's ordered chronologically e.g.), but true it is a very specific form of outlier, and not what I expected based on the name.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I was expecting some clever way to find those stories worth reading but that did not make the cut somehow.
PsylentKnight 3y ago
I suspect OP was going for something along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's usage of "outliers" (unusually successful people)

HackerHG 3y ago

As an aside, the UI looks really clean and easier on eyes (default dark theme + I find the usual dark themes tend to have bad contrast choices). I wonder if something similar is available to browse hacker news in general.

geor9e 3y ago
RSS readers have dark mode. I use Feedbro personally.

JustinGoldberg9 3y ago

bitcoin

divbzero 3y ago

Two related, though not quite identical, lists provided by HN are: https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500 https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500

pmontra 3y ago

Maybe dates in yyyy-mm-dd so non US users won't be tricked by 03/01/2024? Or this could be one of those rare places where today, yesterday and 2 days ago would be appropriate. But then, when does today starts? HN time zone (Pacific time?)

WXLCKNO 3y ago

I was building something like this for personal use but for Reddit to beat my reddit addiction (before they fucked up their API). I called it Detox for Reddit and you could connect your reddit account to get your subreddits and then it would check distribution of scores for that subreddit and only send you the really good stuff in a daily digest e-mail. The idea was that it would prevent the FOMO that made me check Reddit more often to avoid missing the good stuff among the sludge. I wasn't planning on monetizing but monetization strategy would have been a limited number of subreddits (3-5) in a free version, all your subreddits in a small monthly subscription (like 1-2$) and then a larger fee to enable NSFW subreddits. If reddit allowed them, I would have advertised directly on reddit in ADHD and other relevant subreddits like Productivity etc. So I like your idea, I think it works as is but would be enhanced by having customizable thresholds or actual calculation of outliers so you can say give me the top 5% or 1% of posts.

Recursing 3y ago
The free Reddit API is generous enough for this use case. I think it allows about one call per second per API user. I made a Telegram bot very similar to what you described (but free since it's just a few lines of code) https://t.me/MySubredditsBot https://t.me/MySubredditsBot

vermarish 3y ago

I mean, instead of using a fixed threshold at 500, if you use a live threshold determined by the recent average upvotes, then yeah I'd have no qualms with calling them outliers. It's just that this method is susceptible to votecount inflation, a la Reddit from 2014 to 2024.

spiralganglion 3y ago

My preferred alt frontend for HN is https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com I use it in "Top 20" mode. It helps me keep up with the bigger stories just by checking in once a day. Loads super fast, has worked great for many years now.

Recursing 3y ago

I made a Telegram channel which does the same, with a 1000 threshold: https://t.me/top_of_hacker_news https://t.me/top_of_hacker_news

mistermann 3y ago

An interesting added metric/filter would be posts that hit the front-page but then shortly after still exist on the site but are not available via navigating "next" from the main page.

vakmanIn 3y ago

I use https://flutterhackernews.web.app/ https://flutterhackernews.web.app/ for top, best, new stories.

histories 3y ago

I like https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/