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
Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
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