Hacker News: Best

zainny 12 years ago |

In case anyone is wondering, what motivated me to submit this was simply the fact that while I've known about this section forever, a quick poll of people I know who visit HN revealed that it wasn't common knowledge.

I have no idea why this and other sections (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) aren't linked from the main page in a prominent visible manner - especially /best which is great for people like me who check in every few days.

petercooper 12 years ago | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders is another fun page that used to be on the header a couple of years ago.

Also, I have a simple site that tries to take a snapshot of the HN front page every hour so that I can catch up if I'm away for a few days: http://hackerslide.com/

xauronx 12 years ago | | |

Oh cool! I'm on HN pretty constantly and a quick slide showed me that I'm not on quite as always as I thought.

tonymarks 12 years ago | | |

Nice idea.

level09 12 years ago | |

I used to go to http://hckrnews.com to get a similar list, but this seems to use a different algorithm.

redidas 12 years ago | | |

I haven't been to the Hacker News homepage for a long time since using hckrnews. Its such a nice way to get a quick overview of the day.

lelf 12 years ago | |

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=256

kintamanimatt 12 years ago | | |

How did you find that? I've been using HN for a while, and lurking even longer, but never stumbled across that.

lelf 12 years ago | | |

I honestly don't remember. Maybe some thread like this one. Or some googling.

hack_edu 12 years ago | | |

Now, if we only had this comments within threads...

dangoldin 12 years ago | |

Neat - I completely forgot about this. If anyone's interested in these different views on top of HN I created http://yahnr.com/ a while ago that just shows the top stories by vote from the past 24 hours, updated every 15 minutes.

I mostly did it as a way to generate a "pseudo-static" site that is entirely hosted on S3 with a job that just dumps JSON files to it every 15 mins.

arvindsinghy 12 years ago | |

Thanks for pointing this out. I never knew about Best and Lists. :)

ra 12 years ago | |

It's the first link in the footer.

yfefyf 12 years ago | |

Thank you. I've never heard of that either

jwmoz 12 years ago | |

Agree. I had no idea.

Peroni 12 years ago |

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Arjuna 12 years ago |

The "Best" link is for recent (for some value of "recent"), top-rated submissions. For all-time, top-rated submissions:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=+&sort...

I wrote a previous post with some other "points-related" queries here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4659939

estel 12 years ago | |

Does HN Search only have content from the last (time period)?There's definitely some stuff that seems to be missing.

Ningzhi 12 years ago |

http://hckrnews.com/

glomph 12 years ago | |

This website has made hn like 10 times more addictive for me.

superasn 12 years ago |

Another noteworthy hacker news digest: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

revenz 12 years ago |

also this https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

S4M 12 years ago | |

and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

lucb1e 12 years ago | |

What is classic exactly, how does it differ? At a first glance it seems to prioritize age over points more than the current version.

samatman 12 years ago | | |

Classic is pg's solution to the "Endless September" problem.

Classic hn only counts front-page upvotes from users who have been around for awhile. I don't know what awhile is. Longer than me.

JacobAldridge 12 years ago | | |

From memory it's the first year. I think I missed the cut off by a couple of weeks. I'm New Coke, but that still has more HN street cred than Coke Zero.

Ecio78 12 years ago |

Out of curiosity, does anybody know why in the leaders list only the user "Libertatea" has no avg karma info?

DanBC 12 years ago | |

Not enough comments yet.

Ecio78 12 years ago | | |

I see, only few comments, but already 18334 points...

petercooper 12 years ago | | |

Notice how it's almost entirely headlines from large news sites posted evenly pretty much every single day.

This isn't an accusation as such but I'd suspect it's (semi)-automated or it's someone who is amazingly diligent and consistent in posting interesting news.

mpyne 12 years ago | | |

They're on Reddit too, same general technique and username.

I'm leaning toward the 'amazingly diligent and consistent' theory myself. After all I have like no submissions and tons of comments, so who am I to judge? ;)

ccozan 12 years ago | | |

o.O so many points! It doesn't look like a bot, but it has certainly a browser extension that posts to HN with a click.

DanBC 12 years ago | | |

There's the HN bookmarklet.

Anyone considering similar extensions could make a visible guide for 80 characters, so submitters don't have to count chars.

lelf 12 years ago | | |

> only few comments

… and 5 submission only for today

Kiro 12 years ago |

I wonder why this isn't advertised anywhere. Does it only include submissions from the past three days?

taude 12 years ago | |

I never knew about "best" or "lists". Awesome. Thanks.

eitally 12 years ago | | |

I believe you, but I don't know how anyone could miss the "best" page. It's one of only six links across the top banner of the HN site. Often it's more fun to peruse "new", though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

jrochkind1 12 years ago | | |

For me, there is no 'best' or 'list' link at the top of the page.

Only if I go directly to the URLs for best or list, do those links get added to the nav bar. Normally the nav bar is just:

eitally 12 years ago | | |

Oops. I didn't realize this was added by the Hacker News Enhancement Suite Chrome Extension I've been using. Sorry for that accusation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

namenotrequired 12 years ago | | |

It's actually only in the top bar when you're on the best page.

As far as I'm aware, it's only 'advertised' on the Lists page, which is the first of 12 links to the bottom of the page.

DanBC 12 years ago | | |

Lists is in the lower left corner, just above the search box, under the horizontal rule.

hartator 12 years ago |

It seems to go back up to three days. This is great to catch up HN after fishing week-end!

etherealG 12 years ago |

how does best differ from the homepage? not sure i get it.

namenotrequired 12 years ago | |

The home page has a complicated algorithm that seems to take many variables into account to determine the 'hottest' / 'best new' stories (including measures to punish cheating etc.).

As far as I can see the 'best' page seems to simply take all articles submitted in the past ~3 days or so, sort them according to the number of points, and show the top 30 in that order.

Of course, the 'best' page works only thanks to the upvotes articles get (mainly) on the home page.

JacobAldridge 12 years ago | |

Time degrades points more slowly on /best, so it will usually show the top stories from the past 3(ish) days rather than the past 12-24 hours. Perfect for when you've been away for a few days and looking to invest some time in reading.

clone1018 12 years ago | |

Sorting based on points.

raldi 12 years ago | | |

As opposed to...?

__xtrimsky 12 years ago |

Oh nice, I was using rss of other people that did this themselfs, but know I might use this!

EDIT: Nevermind, this doesn't have rss!