Hi HN,<p>I built a microsite that live-tracks the top Hacker News stories and estimates their ranks based on publicly available info.<p>It can help one find the best time to post on HN by showing how much competition there is for the top positions in real-time.<p>The rank calculation formula is based on the following:<p>- Paul Graham's comment: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013</a><p>- Ken Shirriff's blog post: <a href="https://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work....</a><p>The positions implied by the calculated rank and the actual positions often don't match exactly because not all required info is public and because the formula is likely out-of-date. If you know how I can make it more accurate, please let me know.<p>The root mean square error (RMSE) between the implied and actual positions for the data so far is around 2.46. Running a brute-force to find better constants only gave a 3% improvement.<p>Now, let's see if we get some HN inception: an HN post about HN Rank shown on HN Rank itself.<p>Best,
Rok