I understand per the FAQ that "The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted." Is there any further specifics about the basic algorithm that anyone knows and willing to share?
Moreso, the FAQ makes it clear that "moderator intervention" is a factor. Is there anything more known about this how this manual human aspect affects what we as a community will see ranked higher or lower?
Appreciate the opportunity to learn more about how stories are actually ranked on HN. Hopefully no-one takes any issue with asking or discussing transparency here. Thank you.
Edit to add: I see the moderators removed "actually" from the title, that's interesting.
YC has at least two vested interests in keeping it under wraps. 1) If everybody knew the algorithm, it'd get SEO-style abused even worse than it does already. 2) YC aren't in the business of running a tech discussion web forum, they're VCs aiming for 100x exits for their investments, and this site is one of the tools in their arsenal to improve that chances of that happening, so to expect "transparency" on an asset like this website is kinda insane.
Ultimately though, unless you're trying to game the rankings (in which case I couldn't care less how difficult you're finding it), you should just treat that FAQ answer as "close enough, barring details of fraud prevention", and get on with reading/voting/participating.
(If you're just being intellectually curious, there have been old copies of the arc source code around, you'll need to learn a specific dialect of Lisp to understand it, and the publicly available code explicitly leaves out most off the fraud prevention or any other YC-specific modifications this site runs...)
Of course you want the facts, and not some fictional story.
Most adverbs add nothing to a corpus. Before hastily putting down any adverb, if you stop and pause momentarily to think whether it is really necessary, your writing will totally improve.