The problem is there are opaque, global filters which appear abritrary, not that they can be ignored to a degree.

That's not helpful. What night be nice is a URL with the voting and time factors but not the penalties.

I just built this: http://news-yc.appspot.com/

It pulls https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss and re-sorts it with the basic formula (but without penalties). If people like it/return to it I'll clean up the UI for better readability/mobile use (and display comments there instead of linking back to HN).

EDIT: Interestingly, without penalties it looks like this thread would no longer be on the front page.

FOLLOW-UP: My note in the edit was due to a mistake in the implementation, kindly pointed out by OP via email. It is now fixed, and this thread appears in roughly the same place on both sites (there is some lag between the RSS feed that I use as my source and HN proper, so I wouldn't expect an exact match even if I did no re-ranking at all). It is, however, easy and interesting to spot which articles have been penalized; there's an NSA article at the bottom of the front page right now that's at the top of my penalty-free page.

I'll be modifying my page to highlight penalized items and calculate their penalty when I have a bit of time.

Thanks, very nice. How do you get story point scores from the RSS feed? The last time I looked at it, it was missing that crucial bit of information, and I don't see it now either. Or are you using parsing or another data source to get at them?

Thanks! https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss adds information to http://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss using the HNSearch API.