4 ms·

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page. Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

jacques_chester 8y ago
Very often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  Also often links that get mentioned in the comments of the original one.
- spectre256 8y ago
  That's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.
deleted 8y ago
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TrainedMonkey 8y ago
I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic. Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  This only works if your sample space is small, whereas I'd argue the range of topics that can show up on Hacker News is nothing but ;)
  - wpasc 8y ago
    I agree, but the range of topics which may be popular at any given time is narrower and two stories about a single topic are likely to trend at similar times shrinking the sample space somewhat.
dang 8y ago
We call those copycat or follow-up posts and mostly downweight them, on the grounds that predictability makes HN less interesting.
- forgotmypw3 8y ago
  If it's just the same theme, and not just another page on the same thing, why not encourage it instead? Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf
  - dang 8y ago
    Because front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, and there's more information in 30 distinct stories. The natural place for follow-up links is, of course, the original thread.

jacques_chester 8y ago

Very often this is readers following some link, seeing other links from that page and submitting them.

Deimorz 8y ago
Also often links that get mentioned in the comments of the original one.
spectre256 8y ago
That's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

TrainedMonkey 8y ago

I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic. Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.

saagarjha 8y ago
This only works if your sample space is small, whereas I'd argue the range of topics that can show up on Hacker News is nothing but ;)
- wpasc 8y ago
  I agree, but the range of topics which may be popular at any given time is narrower and two stories about a single topic are likely to trend at similar times shrinking the sample space somewhat.

dang 8y ago

We call those copycat or follow-up posts and mostly downweight them, on the grounds that predictability makes HN less interesting.

forgotmypw3 8y ago
If it's just the same theme, and not just another page on the same thing, why not encourage it instead? Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf
- dang 8y ago
  Because front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, and there's more information in 30 distinct stories. The natural place for follow-up links is, of course, the original thread.