The OP says "The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members." How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists.
I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable:
836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?
581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?
510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to
470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview
461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science
441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course
425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time
422 22310813 Gears
421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations
409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?
381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
374 21536789 Build Your Own React
372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education
365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions
364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?
356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017)
355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?
353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking
353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
352 20254057 Startup idea checklist
347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
I did normalize by number of favorites too, so each person had 1 vote shared over all their favorites. The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link, whereas people who have lots of favorites are using it differently to what I want to select for.
At some point I had a similar selection of Ask HN dominance. One problem with my data is I only grabbed the first page of favorite results.
EDIT: SHOOT, you exposed a bug, my parser skips things things without URLs! Hence I ended up filtering out most of the Ask HN's!
EDIT: Fixed it
Now my list looks a bit more similar to yours but not quite. Currently "Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?", your #1 is my #50. If I turn off normalization, it goes to #13 on my lists, so that has quite a significant impact on the rankings.
sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.
I guarantee that a lot of favorites are just ‘to read later’. In that model, articles themselves are read at once or go into Pocket-like services, with selective perusal of comment sections. In most cases, comments are sorta predictable, or interesting perspectives are quickly exhausted—and only especially rich threads go into the favorites to later be pored over. However, interesting ‘Ask HNs’ are obviously followed by lots of interesting comments (hopefully), so they fall straight into the category to be sorted out with attention.
Thank you! Now I just wonder - did you use some command line magic to do this, or did you compose it manually? (no complaints if you did, but it would be interesting to know how to do that in a line of script). Anyway, thanks again.
You can do this with Notepad++ and Block-Selection in like 1,2 Minutes:
- Paste the original list
- Block-Select (Alt + Pressed Mouse1) a block-line behind (trailing) all entries; I admit this step is hard to describe with words, but currently im unable to provide an image/video
Sure. I just did it quickly in Python, it was all of about three or four lines long. I've gotten a bit rusty in Python so when I see a small task I try to give it a go.
Maybe people are favoriting Ask HN items because there are no external links.
I know that when there's a good HN discussion of a link, I usually bookmark the link itself, knowing that I can easily use that to look up HN discussions of it later. But if there is no external link, the only option is to bookmark the HN discussion itself.
Ask HN are just so hugely valuable. There are so many smart, experienced people here who are generous enough to post hard-won insights and information.
I think it's interesting at how many of these are "Ask HN" type posts. It could be that people are often seeking to gather specific crowd-sourced knowledge from experts, what happened to Quora?
I got rid of mine when they started paying people to ask questions, and the quality of questions plummeted. Also, the clearly fake "so-and-so would like you to answer a question" email notifications annoyed me.
This community happened to it. The number of top-voted hacker news blog posts talking about how they acquired their first n users by shitposting on Quora about their startup are too many to enumerate. I think the difference between here and Quora is that the mods here are more opinionated and will kill posts that feel spammy/use voter rings/etc.
Re 9224, I feel bad that BrandonM has been singled out that way because the comment has been universally misinterpreted. He was commenting on Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant back then) and trying to be helpful.
I think a prefix of the comment string is in most cases sufficient to disclose what the comment is about. I tried to include that above, but it got too tricky for silly technical reasons so I bailed.
I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable: