How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

By carefully analyzing the top 60 HN stories for several days, I can answer those questions and more. The published formula is mostly accurate. There is much more tweaking of rankings than you'd expect, with 20% of front-page stories getting penalized in various ways. Anything with "NSA" in the title is penalized and drops off quickly. A "controversial" story gets severely penalized after hitting 40 comments. This article describes scoring and penalties in detail. [Edit: HN no longer penalizes NSA articles ( details ).] How ranking works Articles are scored based on their upvote score, the time since the article was submitted, and various penalties using the following formula : Because the time has a larger exponent than the votes, an article's score will eventually drop to zero, so nothing stays on the front page too long. This exponent is known as gravity .