Very cool. I'm not sure that google would be thrilled about the words that ended up inside of their letters though... its like a subliminal message.

I think that Google is immensely influential in the current startup community, for being the best example (in the current market) of a successful, profitable startup. Furthermore, I think their corporate environment is often held as, if not a model of, then at least better than 99% of corporate environments. I'm sure some people (Michael Church is popular on HN, I think) would disagree. But the point is, everyone wants to be the next Google.

So, color me not surprised.

I don't trust this as I don't see "Stripe" in a very large font! (sort of only half joking)

Google is kind of the Internet company, and HN runs on the Internet, so...

I don't really think that's true at all. Google just generates the most newsworthy headlines.

The same trend can be found on many other sites. I think TechCrunch once posted an analysis of their headlines that showed something like a 3:1 ratio of Google headlines to Apple headlines, and (at least at the time, haven't read them recently) they clearly weren't bigger fans of Google than Apple.

Interesting: I could not spot Facebook there easily?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I found Zuck, but no Facebook.

Did you use a published data set or did you scrape the site?

I used the newsyc250 feed on Twitter, last 1000 tweets.

Cool - thanks

Curious - are you using NetBase for this?

No, it's my own tool written in Clojure, using WordCram.

http://wordcram.org

I should probably know this one but I am having trouble placing that font. It looks beautiful. Can I get a hint?

It's called Coolvetica.

http://www.dafont.com/coolvetica.font

Thank you!

No Microsoft. No Facebook. No IBM.

Very few from this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_technology_...

Do you have the raw ranking data available?

Posts that aren't negative about Microsoft are routinely flagged off the front page.

How did you come to that conclusion? That is, how are you able to differentiate a story naturally being bumped off the front page by other stories getting more aggressive upvotes, and a story being buried by many flags?

If a story has 50 votes and was posted 5 hours ago, it should be ranked higher than any story that has less than 50 points and was posted more than 5 hours ago. If not, it shows that the story was flagged.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/IlAn2.jpg

Another example: http://i.imgur.com/fSJqq.png

Also, Paul Thurott's http://winsupersite.com is completely banned from HN, most probably due to excessively being flagged for the crime of being a Microsoft watcher news site.

I don't think the ranking algorithm is that simple - I think it takes into account recency of votes, although I'm not sure. The first example does not seem suspicious to me, although the second one is surprising to me.

The ranking algorithm is that simple. http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574

Watch articles that are critical of Apple or Google, or those are not critical of Microsoft, most of the time they get flagged down by overzealous fans.

Edit: Happening right now to this very article :)

I recall Paul saying on HN that he tweaks with HN's algorithm, and those changes are not represented in what's posted on arclanguage.org. In fact, he says it in response to that writeup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417 There's also the voting ring detector, which is not distributed.

It's more an observation that HN is highly skewed toward consumer Internet companies. And doesn't focus much on specific companies generally (Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook/Zuckerberg excepted).