Hacker News Headlines (game)

(projects.peercy.net)

16 points | by greenwallnorway 2 hours ago ago

12 comments

  • jtrn an hour ago

    Anchoring!!! If the range has nothing to do with the items in question, just have simple number input. Tested multiple times and all items were below default / midpoint.

    • greenwallnorway 35 minutes ago

      ui idea: show the distribution over the slider

  • codechicago277 an hour ago

    I think you need to adjust the variation of scores, I got 1650 actually guessing, then realized most of the scores were low and got 1800 by just always guessing 239

    • greenwallnorway an hour ago

      Ah! Good idea. Hurts replayability though, since we probably get not more than one 1000 pointer each week.

      • tptacek an hour ago

        Just change the range of scores. If you're not going to deliberately weight the set of stories to include outliers, then the whole game is really played in the 150-400 range anyways, so make that the slider.

  • SparkyMcUnicorn 32 minutes ago

    Got a ~2300 score on my first try. I think I spend too much time here.

  • greenwallnorway an hour ago

    I average a score in the range 1500-2000 (out of 2500).

    I imagine those who spend more time on hn will ace it.

    • tptacek an hour ago

      It helps a lot just to have an intuition for what a big article is here. The slider starts at ~1500 votes, which is an insanely successful story. You can get a strong score just by guessing 400 for everything, nudging up +100 for things you remember being popular and down -100 for things that seem obscure.

      • greenwallnorway an hour ago

        Yea - I didn't think too long on how to calculate points well. Is there a more balanced strategy?

        Identifying some of the truly high-scoring articles (>1000) should be rewarding, and 200 vs 400 points is a pretty big difference on hn

        • codechicago277 an hour ago

          Could split the stories into buckets and then randomly sample from each bucket. Most stories are small, so they’re currently overrepresented in the sampling.

        • tptacek an hour ago

          A "replacement-level" front page story is ~200 votes, +/- 50. If you're drawing just from the front page, and not from a deliberately weighted set of successful vs. marginal posts, most stories should be below 400.

          (It's weird to say this but I'm not nerdy enough to have actually worked this out with data; it's just intuition from spending time here.)

    • ivanjermakov an hour ago

      I got 2000ish, but I remember seeing 3/5 headlines. Perhaps I should spend less time there...