Tools: Scoring HN discussions by practitioner depth, not popularity

What "practitioner depth" means ## What comes out ## The boring stack HN gets 500+ stories a day. The front page is ranked by votes - which surfaces popular content, not necessarily the best discussions. A post about a Google outage will outrank a thread where infrastructure engineers are quietly sharing how they handle failover. sift tries to find the second kind. The scoring algorithm looks at five signals in the comment tree: Depth breadth (30% weight) - Not max depth. The fraction of comments at 3+ levels of conversation. A thread where 20% of comments are three replies deep means real back-and-forth happened. Practitioner markers (25%) - Comments containing experience phrases ("I built," "we used," "in production"), code blocks, specific tool names, or hedging language like "FWIW" and "YMMV" that correlates with practitioners. Score velocity (15%) - Points per hour. Sustained interest over time, not a spike. Author diversity (15%) - Unique authors relative to comment count, weighted by thread size. High diversity at depth 3+ means different people are engaging with each other's thinking. Reference density (15%) - Comments with external links. Citation culture. Before these signals run, threads pass through quality filters: flame detection (hostile short comments at depth), comment length IQR (catches pile-ons), temporal spread (catches flash-in-the-pan), and a discussion density band-pass. 10-12 discussions per day. 6 above the fold, rest behind a tap. Each with a context paragraph explaining why it was picked. Updated 4x/day. Yesterday's picks are gone. Astro static site. Zero client JS. Self-hosted fonts (Newsreader + JetBrains Mono). Cloudflare Pages. GitHub Actions for the pipeline (fetch from Algolia, score, build, deploy). Cloudflare KV for cross-run state so repeated threads get decayed. Total cost: $0/month on free tiers. Total page weight: ~18KB HTML, ~7KB CSS, ~320KB fonts. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to ? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. as well , this person and/or