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Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•47m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?

47•UmYeahNo•1d ago•29 comments

LLMs are powerful, but enterprises are deterministic by nature

3•prateekdalal•4h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

26•nanocat•16h ago•21 comments

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

15•jlmcgraw•18h ago•19 comments

Ask HN: 10 months since the Llama-4 release: what happened to Meta AI?

44•Invictus0•1d ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

139•whoishiring•4d ago•516 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

313•whoishiring•4d ago•512 comments

Ask HN: Non-profit, volunteers run org needs CRM. Is Odoo Community a good sol.?

2•netfortius•13h ago•1 comments

AI Regex Scientist: A self-improving regex solver

7•PranoyP•20h ago•1 comments

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

104•Philpax•2d ago•54 comments

Ask HN: Is Connecting via SSH Risky?

19•atrevbot•2d ago•37 comments

Ask HN: Has your whole engineering team gone big into AI coding? How's it going?

18•jchung•2d ago•13 comments

Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

5•pera•1d ago•13 comments

Ask HN: What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?

3•meffmadd•1d ago•7 comments

Ask HN: How does ChatGPT decide which websites to recommend?

5•nworley•1d ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

8•justenough•1d ago•7 comments

Ask HN: Mem0 stores memories, but doesn't learn user patterns

9•fliellerjulian•2d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

123•blenderob•4d ago•122 comments

Kernighan on Programming

170•chrisjj•4d ago•61 comments

Ask HN: Any International Job Boards for International Workers?

2•15charslong•15h ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Anyone Seeing YT ads related to chats on ChatGPT?

2•guhsnamih•1d ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Does global decoupling from the USA signal comeback of the desktop app?

5•wewewedxfgdf•1d ago•3 comments

We built a serverless GPU inference platform with predictable latency

5•QubridAI•2d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?

8•buchanae•3d ago•18 comments

Ask HN: How Did You Validate?

4•haute_cuisine•1d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Have you been fired because of AI?

17•s-stude•4d ago•15 comments

Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Linux without GUI (for writing)

15•locusofself•3d ago•16 comments

Ask HN: Anyone have a "sovereign" solution for phone calls?

12•kldg•4d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: OpenClaw users, what is your token spend?

14•8cvor6j844qw_d6•4d ago•6 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Erratic HN front page algorithm

7•7777777phil•3w ago
Last week I had two submissions reach the HN front page. Before that, I assumed the ranking followed a roughly monotonic time-decay curve once a post peaked. While watching these two posts, I noticed something different: their rank would sometimes improve after declining, and occasionally oscillate back and forth (Here is a graph showing this behavior: https://imgur.com/a/AQnSh6I). what mechanisms in the HN ranking algorithm cause this kind of non-monotonic movement. Is it due to vote weighting, comment activity, re-ranking batches, or something else?

The graph is from: https://track-hacker-news.com/

EDIT: This is the post referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881

Comments

r721•3w ago
1) Flags ("enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission")

2) Flame-War Detector ("A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.")

Quotes from here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

7777777phil•3w ago
1) But then why would it come back again. 2) Maybe that yes, but then same question as with (1)
gus_massa•3w ago
The main idea is that they are sorted by "upvotes^2/time" or something like that, but there are a lot of automatic and manual penalties, that can be added or removed by the mods.

(Probably upvotes^1.6/(time+1) , but it may have change from time to time, or not, who knows.)

journal•3w ago
I bet if you saw the source code for how the algorithm really worked and what options admins have behind the scenes, will make you vomit.