Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News Hello HN! TLDR; - Quality News is a Hacker News client that provides additional data and insights on submissions, notably, the upvoteRate metric. - We propose that this metric could be used to improve the Hacker News ranking score. - In-depth explanation: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ The Hacker News ranking score is directly proportional to upvotes, which is a problem because it creates a feedback loop: higher rank leads to more upvotes leads to higher rank, and so on... → ↗ ↘ Higher Rank More Upvotes ↖ ↙ ← As a consequence, success on HN depends almost entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting these early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moderator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best. Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community ( https://ift.tt/oYwbUq5 ). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback. Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score. We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one. We look forward discussing our approach with you! Links: Site: https://ift.tt/SYKwbik Readme: https://ift.tt/IwfTmLZ Previous Blog Post: https://ift.tt/3KCc6Mf... Previous Discussion: https://ift.tt/oYwbUq5 https://ift.tt/O2pGgPm March 15, 2023 at 09:06PM
Show HN: StreetComplete, an OpenStreetMap Editor for Humans StreetComplete is an OpenStreetMap[0] editor directed at people who want to contribute and want to do this using their smartphone, without learning how to edit things[1]. It is available as an Android application. It is intended to be used as one walks, with quests appearing as markers on the map. Selecting a marker allows one to answer a simple question. The answer will be added to the OpenStreetMap database, with app handling selecting objects for editing, transforming answer into OSM tags and making edits. OpenStreetMap account is needed to apply edits, but it is possible to start without it, make some edits and login/register later. Note: I am not the main author, but I am one of the active contributors. Github page is at https://ift.tt/2g8lasH and https://ift.tt/3nR9PzS shows what was recently released. [0]OpenStreetMap is a Wikipedia of maps, available on the open licence. This dataset is already used for many interestin...
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