11 ms·

Hacker News Leaderboard

45 points by deepakjc 12y ago

I just saw this today, the leaders are suffiently out-of-reach.

rdlecler1 12y ago
If given the choice to target users based on GMail data or targeting users based on Facebook data, I would take the former. GMail data would provide you with a much clearer and nuanced profile of someone, even if GMail has only 1/3 - 1/2 the user base. Facebook should do well with consumer brands though.
- CWIZO 12y ago
  Wrong thread? :)
  - rdlecler1 12y ago
    Damn! And no delete.
deepakjc 12y ago
Just saw this today, and the "leaders" are far out of my reach...
- petercooper 12y ago
  Trivia: It used to be one of the main links at the top of the page about 2+ years ago. I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50, and so on, and was commenting and posting loads. I guess they didn't like that too much and it disappeared onto the Lists page ;-) I don't post as much now but that's probably a good thing for me.
  - yitchelle 12y ago
    Other than satisfying some curiosity, what would be the value of such a leader board for HN readers?
    - quesera 12y ago
      Not to speak for Peter, but some people like to set goals because the effort to achieve them might reveal interesting bits about the mechanics or psychologies involved, including their own. Some of us tend toward the product side, some the process side, and some the people side. The people side is the most visible and most likely to arouse suspicion among geeks, but it's not inherently worthless. And, of course, self-branding and promotion is a thing that people do.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      It defines the leadership of the Council of Terra, who will be the new global overlords after the Great Forgetting Event of 2018.
  - mikeryan 12y ago
    I've always kind of found the total points to be a bit irrelevant. But I do take karma into account when posting which probably would prevent me from ever breaking into the top 100 of total points but does prevent me from posting every silly thing that comes into my head[1]. It seems karma's a more relevant metric for value then total. 1. Like this :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362307
  - crusso 12y ago
    I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50 Why? Oh, why? I look at my own HN posting as a personal weakness that does nothing to advance my career, general happiness, or sense of personal development. The really successful people I've known in my life don't get caught up in tussling in Internet forums. They stay focused like a laser on goals that are much more recognizable as "success". And that reminds me to close my browser and think about what I really want to accomplish today!
    - mathattack 12y ago
      I hate to admit it, but this is true. In a sense, I would be less likely to hire me if I saw too high a karma score. :-)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - petercooper 12y ago
      Why? Oh, why? Because, like Everest, it was there :-) My time on HN has not been as negative as I infer yours has been though. It benefits me and I enjoy it. That back-handed airy-fairy malarky about what "really successful" people do sounds like a load of preachy cobblers to me though.
    - wglb 12y ago
      I had a significant career advancement as a result of my activity on HN. And I am sure that I am not alone.
wickedOne 12y ago
is this supposed to be some kind of incentive?
ck2 12y ago
Just think what we can do with all those imaginary points. I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. Maybe using tags that become sub-forums of sorts and the front page is just an aggregate. Like tags for SSL, ddos, security, centos, payment-solutions etc. Tags are not hard to implement, there could even be a limited set to choose from, that only certain users can add to, if there is any concern about new tag creation abuse. And then a submission can span multiple tags, it may get buried under one tag but rank better under other tags.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. I think it would be great if there was an "old" button next to "new" in the header, in which submissions of the past month (or so) show up, ordered by a score that allows for old stories to be bumped back to the top, like points * age * comment rate. It would probably also help if new comments would be highlighted.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Not really what you describe, but it's along the lines of "give me an alternative to the frontpage or /new." I don't know precisely how it works. I think it gives more weight to votes from older accounts, but that's just a guess. It does seem to be a slightly higher quality frontpage, but that might just be confirmation bias. After all, if it were truly better, then /classic would be the actual frontpage. There's also http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ which shows a time-ordered list of all submissions that reach the frontpage each day. I prefer it to HN's frontpage, both because you can scroll back over the past few days and because there aren't that many submissions that reach the front page each day, so it's easy to quickly scroll through a list of all of them to pick out anything of interest.
    - 3rd3 12y ago
      My thought was that the comment rate factor would allow for old stories to be bumped back to the top. Highlighting new comments would allow to continue old threads. I clarified my comment above in that regard.
rdlecler1 12y ago
Is there a decay function on these points?
- mikeryan 12y ago
  Not for points but I believe there is for karma.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    I've kept track of my karma and it only ever drops for downvotes.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Huh, is there a difference?
swombat 12y ago
What's interesting to note here is that the points totals have been removed for the top 10. It used to show vast differences between the "leading pack" and the rest... of the order of 20k karma points or so! I guess the rationale for this change is to stop the silly competition (if there was any) once at the top of the pack. I'm not sure there ever was such a competition, mind you. I was #7 once upon a time and it never affected my posting habits.
- ck2 12y ago
  archive.org has the points for January
- lubos 12y ago
  You can still click on individual usernames to see karma. tptacek has 193,243 and patio11 just crossed 100,000 a week ago.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    It's sort of helpful to be able to click a profile and see their karma, to get a sense of whether they're, I don't know, invested in the site? But it's not worth the creepiness.
chdir 12y ago
As always, the lawyer wins ;) (hint: avg 52+)
- kubiiii 12y ago
  I hope he has another account to post mildly relevant/interesting stuff.
  - wglb 12y ago
    My prediction is that he can't write anything uninteresting.
throwaway283719 12y ago
Interestingly, within the top 100 there is a weak positive correlation between the total karma, and the average karma per comment, implying that the people at the top of the leaderboard are actually posting quality content, and not just making up for it with quantity. The closest power law fit is predicted average score = 0.27 * (total score) ^ 0.25 which has a correlation of about 20% with the actual average scores.
- simonster 12y ago
  Either that or people with higher average karma per comment are posting their comments earlier so they get more upvotes. Or HN's comment sorting algorithm is privileging users with higher total karma, so those users have their comments appear above other comments that have the same number of upvotes. Or users with better name recognition are more likely to get upvoted.
chollida1 12y ago
I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news. Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points. I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other message boards in that I only comment when I think I have something relevant to say, which is probably driven from the average point tracking system. I'm actually surprised at the number of leaders with avg scores under 2. I'm guessing these people treat HN's like a regular message board and just comment on everything. The average of the top 100 seems to be 4.3 so it looks like
- ck2 12y ago
  Not really. Go back and look on archive.org, I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now. Submissions get buried quickly now because of the sheer volume. Points are silly though. People who join today are never, ever going to catch up to someone who joined five years ago.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now. I'm fairly certain they changed the ranking algorithm for comments around April/May. My average used to be 10 (it's 4.5 now), and this meant that I could comment on a thread and it would essentially always be the top comment, even if it only had 1 point and the comments below had more. This created a positive feedback loop - because the top comments get read more, they also get voted up more (as long as they're not blatant trolls/spam). So once you had an average of about 6 or more, it was very easy to maintain and rack up points. They seem to have changed the algorithm them - I remember when they did it, because I noticed the effects almost immediately (not just on my own account, but on others' accounts, like tptacek and tokenadult). Overall, this is probably a change for the better, since it mitigates the "rich get richer" effect of commenting frequently while still rewarding people who consistently contribute valuable comments.
    - 12y ago
mjn 12y ago
This is sort of interesting to look at, but not too reliable: it only shows users whose profiles happen to be swapped in to the in-memory Arc data structures whenever the list is regenerated. So from day to day, depending on post and caching and HN restart activity, different people are included or omitted. For example, at the moment raganwald isn't on the leaderboard, even though he has >40k karma, presumably because he hasn't posted in a bit, so his profile is swapped out of memory. I filed a bug about that but it got a WONTFIX [1]. I ran into that while putting together a profile of prolific HN posters [2]. I put it together a bit at a time over several days, and noticed that people were appearing and disappearing from the list, which seemed odd. I ended up finding a third-party list on Heroku that was more stable day-to-day [3]. However it seems not to be updating any more– the numbers are now a few months old. [1] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49 https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49 [2] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html [3] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall
gokhan 12y ago
Any idea on the non-native/native English speaker ratio of that list? US / Rest of the world?
- mjn 12y ago
  I tallied locations ~9 months ago [1]. Of the top 100 posters, I could determine the location of 81. Those broke down as 54 US, 27 non-US. Mostly from English-speaking countries: US/Canada/UK/Australia together accounted for 69/81 (85%). [1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
josefresco 12y ago
This reminds me of those lists middle school boys and girls would make within their social circles. "Cutest Boy" or "Nicest Clothes" ... all pointless when looked upon as an older person, but at the time it was all that mattered.
idlewords 12y ago
Ew
- tptacek 12y ago
  Yep.
droob 12y ago
What's the motivation behind posting these? Is there a way to say "these are the kinds of posts that are good for the community" without tacking a number on it?
- mjn 12y ago
  I would guess it correlates highly with number of posts, so I just think of it as a proxy for "highly active long-time users". Another measure could just be postcount. Karma is like a slightly "corrected" postcount that is supposed to boost people who post highly regarded posts, and downrank those who post a lot but mostly junk. But I would guess just raw number of posts is still the main explanatory factor in the ranking (I don't have the data to test this guess, unfortunately).
jmatt 12y ago
An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Actually, pg was on the leaderboard for years. But, yes, his name was eventually removed, and while it was on the leaderboard, it was typically the top username by a very wide margin.
  - jmatt 12y ago
    I thought the same thing and had to check the wayback machine. He wasn't on the leader boards, at least at that URL. http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombi... http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombi...
    - tokenadult 12y ago
      Oh, sorry, I was thinking of nickb. :) Thank you for checking the Wayback Machine. I must have been aware of pg's karma totals by looking at his individual profile.
tptacek 12y ago
Getting rid of scores on the top 10 was a step in the right direction, but ultimately the long-term goal should be to get rid of scores for the top 2000. Slashdot used to have a thing where your karma would eventually just say something like, "Lots".
dang 12y ago
I find this slightly embarrassing. It's also broken. For example, I switched from my old account 6 months ago and it's still in the top 30. The main reason we haven't done anything about it is that it's not clear what to do. For example, we could make it use a shorter time window than "forever"—but do we really want to gamify karma further? I doubt it.
- tptacek 12y ago
  KILL IT.

45 points by deepakjc 12y ago

I just saw this today, the leaders are suffiently out-of-reach.

If given the choice to target users based on GMail data or targeting users based on Facebook data, I would take the former. GMail data would provide you with a much clearer and nuanced profile of someone, even if GMail has only 1/3 - 1/2 the user base. Facebook should do well with consumer brands though.

CWIZO 12y ago
Wrong thread? :)
- rdlecler1 12y ago
  Damn! And no delete.

deepakjc 12y ago

Just saw this today, and the "leaders" are far out of my reach...

petercooper 12y ago
Trivia: It used to be one of the main links at the top of the page about 2+ years ago. I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50, and so on, and was commenting and posting loads. I guess they didn't like that too much and it disappeared onto the Lists page ;-) I don't post as much now but that's probably a good thing for me.
- yitchelle 12y ago
  Other than satisfying some curiosity, what would be the value of such a leader board for HN readers?
  - quesera 12y ago
    Not to speak for Peter, but some people like to set goals because the effort to achieve them might reveal interesting bits about the mechanics or psychologies involved, including their own. Some of us tend toward the product side, some the process side, and some the people side. The people side is the most visible and most likely to arouse suspicion among geeks, but it's not inherently worthless. And, of course, self-branding and promotion is a thing that people do.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    It defines the leadership of the Council of Terra, who will be the new global overlords after the Great Forgetting Event of 2018.
- mikeryan 12y ago
  I've always kind of found the total points to be a bit irrelevant. But I do take karma into account when posting which probably would prevent me from ever breaking into the top 100 of total points but does prevent me from posting every silly thing that comes into my head[1]. It seems karma's a more relevant metric for value then total. 1. Like this :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362307
- crusso 12y ago
  I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50 Why? Oh, why? I look at my own HN posting as a personal weakness that does nothing to advance my career, general happiness, or sense of personal development. The really successful people I've known in my life don't get caught up in tussling in Internet forums. They stay focused like a laser on goals that are much more recognizable as "success". And that reminds me to close my browser and think about what I really want to accomplish today!
  - mathattack 12y ago
    I hate to admit it, but this is true. In a sense, I would be less likely to hire me if I saw too high a karma score. :-)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - petercooper 12y ago
    Why? Oh, why? Because, like Everest, it was there :-) My time on HN has not been as negative as I infer yours has been though. It benefits me and I enjoy it. That back-handed airy-fairy malarky about what "really successful" people do sounds like a load of preachy cobblers to me though.
  - wglb 12y ago
    I had a significant career advancement as a result of my activity on HN. And I am sure that I am not alone.

wickedOne 12y ago

is this supposed to be some kind of incentive?

ck2 12y ago

Just think what we can do with all those imaginary points. I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. Maybe using tags that become sub-forums of sorts and the front page is just an aggregate. Like tags for SSL, ddos, security, centos, payment-solutions etc. Tags are not hard to implement, there could even be a limited set to choose from, that only certain users can add to, if there is any concern about new tag creation abuse. And then a submission can span multiple tags, it may get buried under one tag but rank better under other tags.

3rd3 12y ago
I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. I think it would be great if there was an "old" button next to "new" in the header, in which submissions of the past month (or so) show up, ordered by a score that allows for old stories to be bumped back to the top, like points * age * comment rate. It would probably also help if new comments would be highlighted.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Not really what you describe, but it's along the lines of "give me an alternative to the frontpage or /new." I don't know precisely how it works. I think it gives more weight to votes from older accounts, but that's just a guess. It does seem to be a slightly higher quality frontpage, but that might just be confirmation bias. After all, if it were truly better, then /classic would be the actual frontpage. There's also http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ which shows a time-ordered list of all submissions that reach the frontpage each day. I prefer it to HN's frontpage, both because you can scroll back over the past few days and because there aren't that many submissions that reach the front page each day, so it's easy to quickly scroll through a list of all of them to pick out anything of interest.
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    My thought was that the comment rate factor would allow for old stories to be bumped back to the top. Highlighting new comments would allow to continue old threads. I clarified my comment above in that regard.

rdlecler1 12y ago

Is there a decay function on these points?

mikeryan 12y ago
Not for points but I believe there is for karma.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  I've kept track of my karma and it only ever drops for downvotes.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Huh, is there a difference?

swombat 12y ago

What's interesting to note here is that the points totals have been removed for the top 10. It used to show vast differences between the "leading pack" and the rest... of the order of 20k karma points or so! I guess the rationale for this change is to stop the silly competition (if there was any) once at the top of the pack. I'm not sure there ever was such a competition, mind you. I was #7 once upon a time and it never affected my posting habits.

ck2 12y ago
archive.org has the points for January
lubos 12y ago
You can still click on individual usernames to see karma. tptacek has 193,243 and patio11 just crossed 100,000 a week ago.
- tptacek 12y ago
  It's sort of helpful to be able to click a profile and see their karma, to get a sense of whether they're, I don't know, invested in the site? But it's not worth the creepiness.

chdir 12y ago

As always, the lawyer wins ;) (hint: avg 52+)

kubiiii 12y ago
I hope he has another account to post mildly relevant/interesting stuff.
- wglb 12y ago
  My prediction is that he can't write anything uninteresting.

throwaway283719 12y ago

Interestingly, within the top 100 there is a weak positive correlation between the total karma, and the average karma per comment, implying that the people at the top of the leaderboard are actually posting quality content, and not just making up for it with quantity. The closest power law fit is predicted average score = 0.27 * (total score) ^ 0.25 which has a correlation of about 20% with the actual average scores.

simonster 12y ago
Either that or people with higher average karma per comment are posting their comments earlier so they get more upvotes. Or HN's comment sorting algorithm is privileging users with higher total karma, so those users have their comments appear above other comments that have the same number of upvotes. Or users with better name recognition are more likely to get upvoted.

chollida1 12y ago

I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news. Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points. I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other message boards in that I only comment when I think I have something relevant to say, which is probably driven from the average point tracking system. I'm actually surprised at the number of leaders with avg scores under 2. I'm guessing these people treat HN's like a regular message board and just comment on everything. The average of the top 100 seems to be 4.3 so it looks like

ck2 12y ago
Not really. Go back and look on archive.org, I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now. Submissions get buried quickly now because of the sheer volume. Points are silly though. People who join today are never, ever going to catch up to someone who joined five years ago.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now. I'm fairly certain they changed the ranking algorithm for comments around April/May. My average used to be 10 (it's 4.5 now), and this meant that I could comment on a thread and it would essentially always be the top comment, even if it only had 1 point and the comments below had more. This created a positive feedback loop - because the top comments get read more, they also get voted up more (as long as they're not blatant trolls/spam). So once you had an average of about 6 or more, it was very easy to maintain and rack up points. They seem to have changed the algorithm them - I remember when they did it, because I noticed the effects almost immediately (not just on my own account, but on others' accounts, like tptacek and tokenadult). Overall, this is probably a change for the better, since it mitigates the "rich get richer" effect of commenting frequently while still rewarding people who consistently contribute valuable comments.
  - 12y ago

mjn 12y ago

This is sort of interesting to look at, but not too reliable: it only shows users whose profiles happen to be swapped in to the in-memory Arc data structures whenever the list is regenerated. So from day to day, depending on post and caching and HN restart activity, different people are included or omitted. For example, at the moment raganwald isn't on the leaderboard, even though he has >40k karma, presumably because he hasn't posted in a bit, so his profile is swapped out of memory. I filed a bug about that but it got a WONTFIX [1]. I ran into that while putting together a profile of prolific HN posters [2]. I put it together a bit at a time over several days, and noticed that people were appearing and disappearing from the list, which seemed odd. I ended up finding a third-party list on Heroku that was more stable day-to-day [3]. However it seems not to be updating any more– the numbers are now a few months old. [1] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49 https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49 [2] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html [3] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

gokhan 12y ago

Any idea on the non-native/native English speaker ratio of that list? US / Rest of the world?

mjn 12y ago
I tallied locations ~9 months ago [1]. Of the top 100 posters, I could determine the location of 81. Those broke down as 54 US, 27 non-US. Mostly from English-speaking countries: US/Canada/UK/Australia together accounted for 69/81 (85%). [1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html

josefresco 12y ago

This reminds me of those lists middle school boys and girls would make within their social circles. "Cutest Boy" or "Nicest Clothes" ... all pointless when looked upon as an older person, but at the time it was all that mattered.

idlewords 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago
Yep.

droob 12y ago

What's the motivation behind posting these? Is there a way to say "these are the kinds of posts that are good for the community" without tacking a number on it?

mjn 12y ago
I would guess it correlates highly with number of posts, so I just think of it as a proxy for "highly active long-time users". Another measure could just be postcount. Karma is like a slightly "corrected" postcount that is supposed to boost people who post highly regarded posts, and downrank those who post a lot but mostly junk. But I would guess just raw number of posts is still the main explanatory factor in the ranking (I don't have the data to test this guess, unfortunately).

jmatt 12y ago

An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

tokenadult 12y ago
Actually, pg was on the leaderboard for years. But, yes, his name was eventually removed, and while it was on the leaderboard, it was typically the top username by a very wide margin.
- jmatt 12y ago
  I thought the same thing and had to check the wayback machine. He wasn't on the leader boards, at least at that URL. http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombi... http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombi...
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    Oh, sorry, I was thinking of nickb. :) Thank you for checking the Wayback Machine. I must have been aware of pg's karma totals by looking at his individual profile.

tptacek 12y ago

Getting rid of scores on the top 10 was a step in the right direction, but ultimately the long-term goal should be to get rid of scores for the top 2000. Slashdot used to have a thing where your karma would eventually just say something like, "Lots".

dang 12y ago

I find this slightly embarrassing. It's also broken. For example, I switched from my old account 6 months ago and it's still in the top 30. The main reason we haven't done anything about it is that it's not clear what to do. For example, we could make it use a shorter time window than "forever"—but do we really want to gamify karma further? I doubt it.

tptacek 12y ago
KILL IT.