<i>The content of a news post is the most powerful source for predicting its popularity.</i><p>I would like to believe this is true, and I would guess that it's probably more true on HN than elsewhere, but I would really like to see them dive more into how they came to this conclusion.<p>I think the moderator led title editing makes this comparison more difficult (not bad necessarily) but it would be worth comparing popularity:content to popularity:title to have a more rigorous understanding.<p>Overall I applaud the approach they took. It seems however that the conclusion/output doesn't give better insight into the parameters which drive post popularity on HN, over previous approaches which seek to understand the underlying voting mechanism [1]. While different they are trying to basically understand the question "what makes for a popular post on HN."<p>Modeling the sentiment of a community under a formal mechanism (vote algo) is incredibly difficult to do correctly, so again kudos for the work and it seems like it's something that could be built on.<p>[1]<a href="http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/" rel="nofollow">http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new...</a>
It isn't too particular to hacker news, although I did like the tables, definitely recognized the topics.<p>SELECTED TOPICS EXTRACTED BY NMF<p>Topic 1 js javascript node react component python config browser<p>Topic 2 pple iphone ipad fbi mac cook sir headphone watch steve<p>Topic 3 invest startup fund venture capital entrepreneur tech raise<p>Topic 4 game pokemon vr nintendo virtual oculus headset steam<p>Topic 5 email clinton website inbox gmail slack spam campaign<p>Topic 7 tesla vehicle musk autopilot elect autonomous battery road<p>Topic 8 facebook twitter advertise zuckerberg messenger snapchat<p>Topic 11 docker deploy cloud kubernet swarm cluster microservices<p>Topic 12 ai intelligence algorithm neurual deep alphago deepmind<p>Topic 14 uber ride city lyft tax vehicle hail self did transport kalanick