Hacker News Confidence

Less annoying hacker news. (What is this?)

This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.


  1. Math Is Hard – OpenBSD Stories 103 upvotes, 4 comments
  2. Optimizing Datalog for the GPU 52 upvotes, 3 comments
  3. 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023) 578 upvotes, 90 comments
  4. Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games 174 upvotes, 25 comments
  5. Hokusai and Tesselations 107 upvotes, 14 comments
  6. The route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement 30 upvotes, 2 comments
  7. USB Cheat Sheet (2022) 299 upvotes, 58 comments
  8. OpenAI Privacy Filter 206 upvotes, 38 comments
  9. The Free Universal Construction Kit 312 upvotes, 65 comments
  10. The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024) 50 upvotes, 7 comments
  11. AGPLv3§74 Empowers Users to Thwart Badgeware Like OnlyOffice 66 upvotes, 11 comments
  12. Rediscovering the Handcart 22 upvotes, 2 comments
  13. Mahjong: A Visual Guide 82 upvotes, 22 comments
  14. Quirks of Human Anatomy 24 upvotes, 4 comments
  15. Exposing Floating Point – Bartosz Ciechanowski (2019) 20 upvotes, 3 comments
  16. GnuPG – post-quantum crypto landing in mainline 58 upvotes, 17 comments
  17. Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day 246 upvotes, 107 comments
  18. Reviving BrowserID in 2026 23 upvotes, 5 comments
  19. EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs 161 upvotes, 70 comments
  20. The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code 247 upvotes, 122 comments
  21. Flickr: The first and last great photo platform 162 upvotes, 81 comments
  22. Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease? 214 upvotes, 114 comments
  23. Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem 351 upvotes, 210 comments
  24. Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish 268 upvotes, 160 comments
  25. The Joy of Folding Bikes 168 upvotes, 105 comments
  26. Tushonka: Cultivating Soviet Postwar Taste (2010) 4 upvotes, 0 comments
  27. APL is more French than English 11 upvotes, 5 comments
  28. America's Geothermal Breakthrough 109 upvotes, 124 comments
  29. Tip: Web requests should not be measured in Hz [Hertz] 7 upvotes, 4 comments
  30. Terra API (YC W21) Hiring: Applied AI Strategist(Health Intelligence) 0 upvotes, 0 comments