I knew this existed, and I was looking for it a few weeks ago; it's an interesting page to browse through every once in a while. But I just couldn't remember the name until now.
Having a "highlight" people can't find doesn't seem much of a "highlight" to me?
Edit 2: I feel like adding an "I feel lucky" link on there that would give you a random sample from the list. It's in reverse chronological order and it would take quite a while to scroll back through all of the comments (there are over 400 at present).
> I feel like adding an "I feel lucky" link on there that would give you a random sample from the list. It's in reverse chronological order and it would take quite a while to scroll back through all of the comments (there are over 400 at present).
How about a link with reverse chronology of random highlights, one per year of HN history?
This could inspire nominations for the highlights back catalog.
I was wondering how I could have browsed to /lists and /highlights and eventually found the first one in the footer of the page. May I suggest to add /highlights there as well? Maybe just after FAQ and before Lists?
+1, After two years from joining HN I’m still learning about it. This is the first time I heard about highlights section! I couldn’t find it in lists nor on any other part of the site yet still interesting to read some comments there that do not show up in best comments section. How exactly this works?
/bestcomments (or whatever name may become in the future) had a drawback, I believe. Technically speaking (and generally), the comments in this section are the ones that belong to stories from /best (or highest-upvoted). These stories obviously get more exposure and attention, so their top comments get more upvotes. For instance, a story with 2,000 points might have a comment with 200 points (which is tenth the score of its parent story) that will obviously hit the /bestcomments, while a comment of, say, 50 points on a 150-point story (which is a third) may never have the chance to hit /bestcomments.. Just some thoughts about my daily social network :)
There is probably some sweet spot of n between 0.5 and 2, but not near 1, such that the quotient of comment score^n and thread score^n gives good results.
We do in fact have down votes, you just need 500 (I think?) karma to be able to use it. When you see comments that are not "dead" but are greyed out, they've been downvoted more than they've been upvoted.
Yeah, at the time of writing I kinda defaulted to assuming it was "just" a tag for posts, which one can use the normal search on. But a while later realized that it very likely isnt.
But reading through the list, you made dang good choices in highlighted comments.
We put it in /highlights which may be of interest to people: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights