Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by minimaxir 2920 days ago
On the other hand, it's a heuristic that does catch threads that become trainwrecks (recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17351353)

Anecdotally, it has been a safe heuristic. (IIRC it also incorporates comment depth, and the Ruby thread has a lot of deep comments)