HN Ratio

Hacker News top 50 stories ranked by Comment/Score ratio.

Why

Being a long-time Hacker News reader, I realized that most interesting HN submissions for me are of two categories:

• stories that attract a lot of attention and comments, signaling active and extended debates
• stories that attract a lot of attention but few comments, signaling very insightful post that requires no further comments

Hence, I used the Comment/Score ratio to sort the top HN submissions and locate these stories at the top and the bottom of the list.

Result

Web App

Raw results by date

Note that new "promoted" stories with low votes and HN-backed job listings are filtered.

Why not use HN API in real time?

• It takes some time to get all the data from Hacker News
• HN API does not have archive for top stories in past, whereas I want an archive so that I can find what I missed

Currently I have a GitHub action job that runs daily at 20:00+8 to fetch the top stories.

How to run the script

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Then

$ python hn-ratio.py

Result for the day will be generated in both json and plain text format (with basic visualization) in the results directory.