I appreciate that decisions have to be made, but it's odd that several of the things I think of as HN classics don't appear to be in this list. Things like "The Story of Mel" ... how can that not be there?<p>What submissions do <i>you</i> think of as classics, and yet don't appear? How can the selection criteria be improved?<p>================<p>Edit <i>(After OrangeMonkey's comment)</i>:<p>Sorry, OrangeMonkey's reply to this comment made me realise that "The Story of Mel" isn't necessarily recognised by everyone, so I did the HN search[0] and here are the top few hits. I haven't made all these into links, because you can do the search for yourself. If you do so you'll see that the exact same URL <i>is</i> submitted many times, but doesn't always get 30 or more votes each time. Possibly different URLs are found and submitting because the previous ones are rejected by the dupe-detector.<p>Finding the true HN classics is not a simple job, so consider this a useful test case. If your criteria don't find this one, maybe a more complex selection criterion is needed.<p><pre><code> The Story of Mel (1983) (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html)
445 points|thunderbong|17 days ago|167 comments
The Story Of Mel (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)
169 points|jacquesm|8 years ago|77 comments
The story of Mel (1983) (http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html)
80 points|vaksel|13 years ago|22 comments
The Story of Mel Explained (http://jamesseibel.com/blog/?p=109)
68 points|seibelj|7 years ago|25 comments
The story of Mel, a Real Programmer (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html)
43 points|donw|14 years ago|9 comments
The Story of Mel (1983) (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html)
22 points|thefreeman|8 years ago|8 comments
The Story of Mel ... (http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html)
19 points|urlwolf|12 years ago|17 comments
</code></pre>
[0] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+mel" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+mel</a>
There have been a few attempts to aggregate "HN Classics" over the years, each a little bit different:<p>- <a href="https://posobin.com/hn_classics" rel="nofollow">https://posobin.com/hn_classics</a> (this post) which uses inflation-adjusted scores<p>- <a href="https://jsomers.net/hn" rel="nofollow">https://jsomers.net/hn</a> with only posts from before 2019<p>- <a href="https://hn.lindylearn.io" rel="nofollow">https://hn.lindylearn.io</a> (built by me) with live-updating data ranked by the number of reposts per URL
I'm not sure how the ordering is done but I feel like the dataset is incomplete. Many "classic" links that get re-posted every few months don't show up and I barely recognize any in the first ~50.<p>I also think the threshold is too low. I'd go with something more strict like 50 upvotes and reposted at least 10 times.<p>Example: Currently at position 0 in the list: "Watch a VC use my name to sell a con (jwz.org) Posted 2 times, created in 2011". When I check the same link in <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=watch%20a%20vc%20use%20my&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a> I get 4 results not 2.
I see that many links were posted to like 5 times, 8 times, 11 times. What are the rules around reposts?<p>On one hand I see these classics being reposted again and again. But on the other hand we also see some posts marked [dupe]. What are the rules? What is allowed to stay and what is marked as [dupe]?
> Duckduckgo gets more than 10M direct queries per day in 2016 (duckduckgo.com)
Posted 3 times, created in 2012<p>Not sure how this one ended up here?
Here’s the fixed link to Be Kind: <a href="https://www.briangilham.com/monday-mailer/be-kind/" rel="nofollow">https://www.briangilham.com/monday-mailer/be-kind/</a>
I've been on HN since 2014 and I don't think this ranking is accurate.<p>Edit: Maybe can share the exact metrics you used? Did you take an average of the votes?<p>Large of number repeated submissions would result in a low average score.<p>Edit 2:<p>Here you can find some big recurring submissions via "by: dang previous news.ycombinator":<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3A%20dang%20previous%20news.ycombinator&sort=byPopularity&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>More recently "by: dang macroexpanded news.ycombinator":<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3A%20dang%20macroexpanded%20news.ycombinator&sort=byPopularity&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>
Meta: this seems to be a classic case of an insufficiently dated web page, making it age not so well. There's no way this was just created, right? It seems so weird to say "until January" in August the year before ...<p>Most links seem to be at least ~5-7 years old, or more. That also doesn't feel accurate, I mean a post by jwz (that you can't even visit from here (beware nsfw)) at number 1?