| Looking at the arc 3.1 source, I'm not sure why that's the case. The real work here is done by * frontpage-rank* . It's implemented as follows: (def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity* ))
(* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1)
(if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase* ) 60) gravity))
(if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll)) .5
(blank s!url) nourl-factor*
(lightweight s) (min lightweight-factor*
(contro-factor s))
(contro-factor s))))
realscore subtracts any votes that are noted as "sockvotes" from the item's raw score.The first few lines here won't change too much here for either comment. Obviously, the 110 point comment will have a higher base score than the 17 point comment. They're about the same age, so (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase* ) 60) gravity) will be about the same for each of them. So the division will come up with a number that's a few times higher for brh's comment. The interesting part is the multiplication here. I don't think either would be considered a story, so neither is being multiplied by .5; neither has a blank url, so they're not getting hit by nourl-factor. It comes down to the final part, whether one is considered "lightweight", and what the contro-factor* of each is. It takes into account the number of children of the comment (the visible-family call). It shouldn't make a difference, though -- neither of the posts has more than 20 children, so contro-factor for both should be 1. I think I'm missing something, as what I've said wouldn't explain the ordering. Notably, though, it doesn't take into either account karma or average karma of the poster to determine rank. Edit: as ChaosMachine pointed out, it does take into account users' average karma: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923716 . Ey pointed out that pg's post is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398764 |
It takes the user's karma score into account in the ranking.