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100 most recent votes This has me curious. Why 100? Why not 0 or all? 100 seems to indicate you're aggregating the 100 most recent votes for some specific p
by sillysaurus3 12y ago
100 most recent votes
This has me curious. Why 100? Why not 0 or all? 100 seems to indicate you're aggregating the 100 most recent votes for some specific purpose, and that the feature unintentionally leaked the data.
I wonder if mods have the ability to go to a page, type in a username, and see the 100 most recent things they've upvoted/downvoted? I guess as a way of looking for voting rings?
I often upvote comments I feel are unfairly downvoted, definitely not because I agree with the comment. Hopefully vote history isn't being used as a metric of character. Then again, maybe it's a useful filter. I've often wished Reddit would drag down comments from people who upvote angry bully-type comments from other people, so there might be all kinds of interesting ways "100 most recent votes" could be used.
- yzzxy 12y agoI would bet on technical reasons. From what I've read HN uses some unusual caching and optimization strategies - part of how the Arc application was optimized after initial development. I have no idea if this is the case here but it seems plausible - there is (outdated) source available[0] so you may be able to take a look for yourself. [0] Mirrored at https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- sillysaurus3 12y agoThere's nothing particularly unusual about what Arc does. This probably has a technical explanation, but the most logical deduction seems to be that when a mod visits your profile page, they can follow a link that will show them the 100 most recent items you've voted for. Either that, or a program is aggregating the 100 most recent votes in order to be used in some filtering or weighting algorithm to change the ranking of comments. (People who upvote what YC alums/patio11/tptacek/etc upvote may be upvoting high-quality things, so make their votes count more. That sort of thing.) I guess it might improve server performance if the server caches your 100 most recent upvotes for page generation purposes, since when it serves you a page, it has to know whether you've upvoted each comment or not. But it seems like a stretch to say it's only used for that purpose, because it still needs to know whether you've upvoted things from very old pages, yet the list stays at exactly 100 items. And they already hunt for and punish voting rings. I was just wondering the extent to which votes are scrutinized. EDIT: The more I think about this, the dumber I sound. The dataset that was leaked was almost certainly used to generate pages and nothing more. It's the simplest explanation, for one. Manually looking doesn't scale. The program to look for voting rings is probably a completely different program. Etc.
- yzzxy 12y agoAs I said, I have no idea if this is what is happening, it would just fit in with the pattern of "weird" caching that I've heard HN uses - I mention Arc only because some of the caching is related to eliminating closures kept around for things like user sessions IIRC[0], though I assume any Lisp would lead to similar optimizations. [0] It appears this is not the case with the vote caching from staff comments in this thread.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kogir 12y ago100 was picked because it's a large round number. We need vote history to show vote arrows correctly, and for performance reasons we try to avoid loading entire vote files.
- StavrosK 12y ago128 is round. 100 is just weird!
- andrewstuart2 12y agoIt's true. I can count it on my own 10 hands.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoIf you flip your fingers like bits, you can count up to 1024. Using your toes would get you up to 1048576.
- frandroid 12y agoYour circle is very square.