The best HN comments

Is "best" really the proper defining word to use? More eyeballs are viewing the RIP Michael Jackson thread, thus resulting in more potential up-votes -- based on that, I'd be hard-pressed to establish it as the "best" comment... maybe "most up-voted" is more fitting.

"How is this even remotely hacker news?" is <i>not</i> one of the best HN comments.

It seems that most of the highly voted comments are about how something/someone is bad/wrong, but there are some positive ones in there too, like those by ktharavaad, lutorm, kirse, patio11 (x3), jbr, plinkplonk, chriseppstein. Actually, 11 out of 30 isn't bad! I tend to forget that Hacknews is a public forum on the internet.<p>I think I just need to focus on the worthwhile comments, and ignore the negative ones (but it's hard: <a href="http://xkcd.com/386/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/386/</a>). If everyone did this, the problem wouldn't exist.<p>BTW: On the homepage (not this one), see the "lists" link at the very bottom, on the left. It's: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/lists" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/lists</a> The 3rd one, "bestcomments" is what been submitted here, but with an argument "?newsToMe" appended (presumably to avoid hitting the last story about it, 544 days ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93526" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93526</a>)

I would be interested to see a list of the best HN comments as judged not by raw karma points but as:<p><pre><code> karma points of the comment / karma points of the post</code></pre>

Either this has a cutoff of a few weeks (likely, since I've seen higher-rated comments than the ones here), or HN suffers from insane inflation.

I know this post is about the "best" comments, but that doesn't necessarily indicate quality. I'm not sure what might be a good algorithm to judge quality, but popularity is most certainly not it. To all you natural language processing nerds out there...maybe there is a way of looking at word choice, with weights also given to amount of karma but relative to the other karma distributed to other comments.

I'd like to see karma points per view. As there are more and more people on HN, the views go up, and hence the upvotes. More, any comment posted at an unpopular time gets overlooked and sinks without a trace. Having karma per view would help to offset that problem, if not fix it.<p>Currently the time factor is doing a similar job, but I think page views would be a better value to use.

Searchyc has a much more interesting top-list than News.YC does. PG should pull a Summize with Searchyc.

How about removing the voting widgets on that page?

comments on comments, hacker news takes the y combinator to a whole 'nother level

best-ness in the mouse-hand of the voter

The list is not accurate.