Inflation Adjusted Hacker News
The number of points a story has accumulated on Hacker News is a good indicator for how relevant and overall how good the story is. I noticed that the average front page story has a lot more points today than it would have had a few years back. This is very likely a consequence of the growth of the HN community. More people who vote equals more points on average, makes sense. This makes it harder to browse through older stories and gauge how good a story is purely based on the point count.
Based on past data I created a HN inflation index. The index is calculated on the basis of very simple calculations. It's basically the average point count of the top 100 stories of each day. I used a moving average of one year to account for seasonal changes in HN-behaviour.
The following chart shows how Hacker News Points have inflated over time:
Get inflation of any Hacker News story
Browser Extension
I made a browser extension which automatically shows the inflation adjusted point score of a Hacker News story next to the actual number of points.
The extension currently only works on the official Hacker News news site (news.ycombinator.com). I'm considering adding support for HN-Algolia or other frequently used HN-clients in the future. Here's a few screenshots:
The extension is available for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately the extension is only available as a direct download for Chrome because I didn't bother paying Google money to publish this extension. The Firefox extension is available in the official Add-On store.
It's a bit cumbersome to manually install a .crx file in Chrome nowadays so maybe I'll submit the extension to the official Web Store if there is enough demand.
Download links:
Check out the source code of the web-extension if you're interested.
If you have any questions, suggestions or anything else, just shoot me an email: 'instruments dot digital at aarone dot name'