Top all-time · #20794
Felix Dietze
Personal blog · felx.me · on HN as manxaiprogramming
Felix Dietze's personal blog at felx.me covers ai and programming. Since 2021, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Improving the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Felix Dietze's posts on Hacker News ranking, including his 2021 post on improving the ranking, as background on how new items get a boost and on the upvoteRate work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts by Felix Dietze
Most-linked posts?
- Improving the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm3 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2021-09-02
What Hacker News says?
Because of feedback loops in the ranking algorithm, you need to be a bit lucky. I described this in more detail here: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Linus Torvalds: Rust for the Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged for Linux 5.20”Submitted Improving the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm as a story · 122 points
HN discussionVery interesting! Identifying great new content is a big unsolved problem for HN IMHO. Unfortunately, scores are not a good metric to predict, because they are not comparable (see https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... ). A better metric might be "upvoterate", defined as how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story. More about that here: https://gith…
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Using reinforcement learning and $4.80 of GPU time to find the best HN post”Submitted Mental Models for LLMs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionScores are not a good metric to be compared. I did some data analysis and wrote about it here: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Using reinforcement learning and $4.80 of GPU time to find the best HN post”If i recall correctly the Hacker News ranking gives new items a bit of a boost... possibly more-so for some random users, in order to give them a chance at getting some traction. You might be able to find out more here: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again”We explained some of the problems of the ranking algorithm in an article and backed it up with data: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... From that point on, we continued to research this problem and are working on an improved HN frontpage website right now, which takes live data from HN and factors out the feedback loops. It should be ready to use soon. If you want to get early access or…
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Ask HN: Do you think many posts don't get the front page attention they deserve?”Which voting algorithm are you using? I recently wrote an article about that topic and working on part 2: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Happy to help if you want to talk about it.
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Show HN: IndieFeeds.com, HN clone where submissions come from personal websites”There's some luck involved. I explained how it works in a recent article: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Ask HN: How do I get my question on Hacker News to show up in the “ask” section?”Interesting question. One difference is that upvoteRate formula adjusts for where the submission appears on the page (the rank). It also adjusts for how many site-wide upvotes occurred during that time period. You are right, since we don't know the number of users who saw the page + the vote icon, so we can't calculate the probability Pr(upvote|saw submission with upvote button). But the upvoteRate formula would be…
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News”Looks good to me! How does your ranking algorithm work? I recently wrote an article about how it works at Hacker News, if you want some food for thought: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Let me know if you have any questions.
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Show HN: A link aggregator without dark patterns”Links: Site: https://news.social-protocols.org/ Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme Previous Blog Post: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking... Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Show HN: UpvoteRate – Towards a fairer ranking formula for Hacker News”https://social-protocols.org/ https://felx.me/ https://deliberati.io/ Ideas and research on how to improve social media protocols and design large scale human interaction on the internet. Applying computer science, game theory, statistics. Social Protocols is the research group, while the other two are personal blogs.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Hello HN! TLDR; - We propose a new metric called upvoteRate that could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - Quality News is a Hacker News client that shows the upvoteRate for each story, along with additional charts and stats. - Check it out at: https://news.social-protocols.org/ In-depth explanation: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportiona…
Comment linking /2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm.html
on “Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News”