Top all-time · #4705
Evan Sangaline
Personal blog · sangaline.com/post · on HN as foobdataprogrammingmath
Evan Sangaline's personal blog at sangaline.com covers data, programming and math. Since 2015, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Evan Sangaline's posts for data-driven analyses, such as reverse engineering the Hacker News ranking and front-page removals, plus keyboard layout optimisation and gesture typing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Evan Sangaline's personal website with technical blog posts and open source projects.
Most-linked posts?
- Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-03-10
- Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-10
- Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-13
- Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-16
- Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-10
- Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-31
- /blog/optimizing_for_swype/FITALY.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-10
What Hacker News says?
Does it matter? The author seems representative of exactly the type of users you want in a community like this. Long standing user account, high karma, produces decent comments and great content (the visualizations in the Swype article is another example [0]) and even puts HN comments on the blog. Whatever mechanism that ends up discouraging people like this in favor of trigger happy flaggers is broken. Fortunately…
Comment linking /post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype/
on “Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page”Submitted Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page as a story · 1274 points
HN discussion> The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page (sangaline.com) is : http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new...
Comment linking /post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/
on “Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page”Submitted Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more as a story · 564 points
HN discussionThat really depends on your project and tech stack. If you're into Python and are going to deal with relatively static HTML, then the Python modules Scrapy [1], BeautifulSoup [2] and the whole Python data crunching ecosystem are at your disposal. There's lots of great posts about getting such a stack off the ground and using it in the wild [3]. It can get you pretty darn far, the architecture is solid and there are…
Comment linking /post/advanced-web-scraping-tutorial/
on “Ask HN: What are best tools for web scraping?”Submitted Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm as a story · 349 points
HN discussionAwesome, I really love meta-analyses too! Our product involves web scraping so it's a natural fit to write articles about scraping and analyzing data in general. A few of our articles so far [1,2,3] would probably be classified as meta-analyses and we have some more in the pipeline! Feel free to sign up for the newsletter in the footer of http://intoli.com if you would like to read those articles after they're publi…
Comment linking /post/wayback-machine-scraper/
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype as a story · 103 points
HN discussionWhat are peoples' thoughts on the marketing effectiveness of quality relative to quantity in blogging? We have recently started publishing what we consider to be very high quality material (the majority of them have front-paged on HN if that's any indication). Most of these have been published on [1] so far but we're in the process of transitioning to a more official company blog [2]. A close friend who really knows…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Reverse Engineering the HN Ranking Algorithm as a story · 70 points
HN discussionThat minimizes distance traveled. https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layou... minimizes errors.
Comment linking /post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype/
on “FUTO Keyboard”Submitted Internet Archaeology: Scraping time series data from Archive.org as a story · 66 points
HN discussionThis is a fun demo but, as others have mentioned, simulated annealing really isn't necessary, or even that appropriate, for this specific problem. I threw together the same demo with a very trivial algorithm that I think does a more accurate job of reconstructing the same images in significantly less time than the simulated annealing [1]. The algorithm consists of first finding the closest matching pair of pixels as…
Comment linking /blog/image_unshredder/
on “Image unshredder by simulated annealing (2015)”Submitted Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThe complexity of gesture typing opens the door to a lot of interesting questions that aren't relevant for "normal" typing. I really enjoyed reading through this notebook, it's very clear and presented well. What's more impressive is that most of the questions were answered with less than ~150 lines of code! In regards to the 6th question (one left only partially answered), some of you might find this blog post (pos…
Comment linking /blog/optimizing_for_swype/FITALY.html
on “Gesture Typing”Submitted Optimizing Touchscreen Keyboards for Swype Input as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSure, but that's not all. Or maybe it is -- who knows. Certainly not you or I, because the only information that is public is the score and the date. The problem is the opaqueness of it Which leaves a lot of room for the appearance of capriciousness, and sometimes even (though not so much in this case, this is not nearly that consequential a story) malice. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov…
Comment linking /post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/
on “FedEx will give you $5 to reinstall Flash”Submitted Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm perfectly willing to make people learn all sorts of new things :-). We focused on optimizing over the permutations of the key labels in this analysis but we designed dodona [1] to be much more flexible. To demonstrate this, I just threw together a quick little notebook [2] evaluating the average distance traveled for FITALY. As you'd expect, it's much shorter than what we find using a random configuration. We'd…
Comment linking /blog/optimizing_for_swype/FITALY.html
on “Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype”Submitted How many people will actually die this week because of Daylight Savings Time? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSure, here you go: http://sangaline.com/blog/optimizing_for_swype/img/qwerty.ke...
Comment linking /blog/optimizing_for_swype/img/qwerty.keyboard.svg
on “Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype”Submitted Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe mod's can choose to "bump" a story off the front page as a form of moderation. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov... They do it constantly to stories deemed "not worthy".
Comment linking /post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/
on “Dissecting Trump’s Most Rabid Online Following”Submitted Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe content of a news post is the most powerful source for predicting its popularity. I would like to believe this is true, and I would guess that it's probably more true on HN than elsewhere, but I would really like to see them dive more into how they came to this conclusion. I think the moderator led title editing makes this comparison more difficult (not bad necessarily) but it would be worth comparing popularity…
Comment linking /post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/
on “Predicting Popularity of Posts on Hacker News (2016) [pdf]”Submitted Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote a little utility called svganimator [0] which is relevant to this. If you're just in a hurry to get something going it can be used to combine a set of static SVG files into one animated SVG file in the same way that you might combine images to create a GIF. It also has an experimental mode where it tries to smoothly interpolate between frames and store things more efficiently. This tends to work really well…
Comment linking /blog/optimizing_for_swype/
on “Creating Cel Animations with SVG”This is asked very regularly. HN has an official policy which you can google. Here is one interesting (maybe too long) answer: http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new...
Comment linking /post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/
on “Ask HN: How Hacker News post are ranked?”Previous discussions, all from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867739 (349 points, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857086 (1274 points, 317 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838399 (70 points, 8 comments) -- As a tangential slightly OT bonus, I also found an informative article+discussion from the same author: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more…
Comment linking /post/advanced-web-scraping-tutorial/
on “Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm (2017)”I find that typing on a phone (iPhone or Android) these days is substantially easier than typing on an iPad because of swipe. It's still nowhere as efficient as a keyboard in the hands of a skilled typist, but I can often produce text fast enough that it isn't worth getting out my laptop. On an iPad it's far worse, because I actually do have to use the bad QWERTY touchscreen key-by-key. What I keep hoping for as far…
Comment linking /post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout-for-swype/
on “Text editing on mobile isn’t ok”
