[HN Gopher] Show HN: Prioritize Anything with Stacks
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Show HN: Prioritize Anything with Stacks
In life's journey, the quality of our decisions often determines
our path. After many trips around the sun, the most impactful
advice I could give the younger generation is to hone your decision
quality. Life presents us with a continuous series of choices,
frequently made with limited information and an abundance of
unpredictable variables. By optimizing our decision-making process,
we increase our chances of staying on a favorable path. I make so
many decisions in personal and professional spheres that I wanted
to make it as easy as possible to get straight to the point. My
goal was twofold: 1. To minimize bias as much as possible. 2. To
alleviate the overwhelming anxiety that often accompanies complex
choices with unclear outcomes. I recognized that many decisions
impact not just ourselves but also our friends, family, and other
stakeholders. This realization led me to develop a solution that
works equally well for individual use and collaborative decision-
making. While I didn't invent pairwise comparative analysis, nor
am I the first to build a tool based on this concept, I've created
my own implementation. I believe it offers a unique approach to
decision-making, and I hope you try it.
Author : seanconnollydev
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-02-25 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stack-ranker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stack-ranker.com)
| bberenberg wrote:
| I was actually looking at building something like this for
| analyzing different AI generated voices. I ended up going down a
| statistics rabbit hole to understand how to reduce the total
| number of comparisons to be made while still getting a good
| result. Have you considered how your tool can work with different
| metadata across the comparison set to reduce total comparisons
| needed? Also accepting a CSV similar as an input?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| I don't know how OP does it, but Elo ratings are a pretty good
| tool for this kind of thing. In each pairwise comparison, the
| selected option "wins", the other option "loses", and ratings
| are adjusted accordingly.
|
| You can incorporate priors by setting initial ratings
| differently, or force correlations between items by treating a
| win against option X as something like 0.8 wins against option
| X and 0.2 wins against options correlated with X.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| This really is a deep rabbit hole and something I've played
| around with and considered devoting a lot of time to. Look into
| Expert Elicitation, Decision Theory and Order Theory.
|
| _There is no one-size fits all._ This the most important thing
| to keep in mind from the start.
|
| This type of ranking is really all about UX. The math is just a
| tool to make it easier. It's a real trap to find some theory
| and think this will solve things, but if it doesn't actually
| make it easier for people to make decisions, you really didn't
| solve the problem.
|
| Sometimes it looks like stack ranking would help. But, often
| you don't really need a stack. Maybe you just need the top one
| or the top N. Maybe each item has a weight and you want to fit
| the most value for a given weight allocation (knapsack
| problem). Maybe the weights and values aren't actually known,
| just relatively (this one is more work and more valuable than
| that one). Maybe value is compounding, like u({A, B}) > u({A})
| + u({B}).
|
| Maybe the preferences are circular, like A > B > C > A. But
| that's not possible! Well, that's what the user says and just
| throwing up an error screen probably won't fix it. You'll need
| to handle that gracefully.
|
| My suggestion is to _really_ stick to one specific problem and
| solve for that, versus something general. Also allow the input
| to be rich. Rather than a win /lose, you might be better off
| with -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 in comparison (or words). Allow ties
| until they're actually a problem. Why make people struggle to
| choose between two options when neither of them end up being
| used?
|
| It can also help to see things as probabilistically better
| rather than strictly better. Elo scores help with this, like
| the other comment said.
|
| Decision ability is a resource. Decision fatigue is real and
| fast. Optimize for taking up as little as that as possible from
| the user, especially if that user is you.
| dartos wrote:
| I'd suggest changing that name. In a world where tech layoffs are
| super common "Stack Ranking" has an extremely negative
| connotation.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| That was my first thought before I even clicked the link.
|
| Maybe "bracket" or something tournament-associated.
| syspec wrote:
| Name is fine,
| sverhagen wrote:
| Well, to be fair, you could use it for that too?
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| I felt this tbh. I preferred stacks.com or something but
| domains like that are hard to come by.
| stared wrote:
| Overview and Items have the same form and style, so it is easy
| visually to confuse these.
|
| Also, I am not sure what it does. First, I write to options. Then
| it asks me which one I prefer. I guess I am missing what added
| value is here.
| anonymous344 wrote:
| i don't get it. need youtube video
| joeyagreco wrote:
| Belli is a restaurant rating app that uses a similar approach to
| ranking restaurants and giving them a score 0-10.
|
| Really simplifies things.
|
| https://beliapp.com/
| qntmfred wrote:
| I built a tool for myself like this a while back. For me, the
| most common usage pattern was making a braindump bullet list of
| TODOs in Obsidian, realizing there were enough items that it
| wasn't immediately clear where to start, and then copy/pasting
| the bullet points into my tool to start the ranking process and
| getting the prioritized list at the end.
|
| In other words, consider making it easy to paste a bunch of items
| to create your items rather than one at a time with the card UX
| you have now
| xnx wrote:
| Seconded. This tool is most useful when the number of items to
| evaluate exceeds the amount you'd want to type in by hand.
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| Love this! I like the idea of being able to add subtext to help
| explain to others in scenarios where you're trying to work with
| other participants but the copy/paste option makes a ton of
| sense.
| 2shortplanks wrote:
| Whoa! STOP!
|
| At no point did anything say when I was creating stacks that this
| info would be public for other users of the site! I was shocked
| to find what I'd been ranking (which luckily was just chip
| flavors) available for anyone to see. What if I'd tried putting
| clients to evaluate in there?
|
| You can't just collect personal data and share it like that!
| piyuv wrote:
| https://stack-ranker.com/stacks/best-chip-flavor/results
| tash9 wrote:
| How the hell is Sour Cream and Onion not on there
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| They can.
|
| https://stack-ranker.com/privacy By
| continuing to use our service, you accept the terms of the
| current privacy policy.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Their privacy policy does say "When you create a Stack, please
| be aware that all content you input is public and can be viewed
| by anyone.", but I agree, it's super unintuitive that this is
| the case.
|
| The "Create Stack" button should probably say "Publish Stack".
|
| (and ideally also an "unlisted" checkbox, which generates you a
| uuid-based sharing URL)
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| > You can't just collect personal data and share it like that!
|
| yeah, there should be some rule about what user data can be
| collected and transparency about its usage...
|
| wait, that's the GDPR! _grin_
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Europe let me iiiiinnnnn
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| Unlisted sounds like a good option.
| Redster wrote:
| So, it took me a while to figure out what this was. This is
| essentially a round-robin polling tool, with ranked results. Each
| poll-session has only two options that you choose between, but
| the entire poll can have n-options. At the end, you'll see the
| options ranked from most-chosen to least-chosen.
|
| A gif, or something explaining the "what" on the home page might
| be good. I get that the conventional wisdom is to show the
| problem you solve, but "make better decisions, one choice at a
| time" left me confused. When I actually used one of the demo
| stacks, I was like, "Oh! I need this!"
|
| Congrats on building a cool tool. I like it. I hope it goes well
| for you.
|
| One feature I would be interested in is to separate answers by
| user. (Even if it was anonymous, with no user data collected) I
| would love to see what packages of choices came through a stack.
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| Awesome. Some kind of gif/visual makes a lot of sense for
| people who aren't familiar with the ranking method.
| megadata wrote:
| Will it help with analysis paralysis? If not, is there anything
| that does?
| Redster wrote:
| I can't decide.
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| It does for me, definitely. It's so much easier to think about
| 2 options vs 20. It works better if you really sit and think
| about it rather than just mindlessly clicking through though.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I created a stack, but now I only get a "500 - Internal Server
| Error," so I can't test it.
|
| edit: for debugging purposes, if the author reads this, the stack
| is https://stack-ranker.com/stacks/quis-in-historia-
| apollonii-r... -- it consists of number of entries (less than two
| dozen, I think), each with the main text and sub text filled out.
| seanconnollydev wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. I'm working out a few kinks. Your
| stack should work again!
| recursive wrote:
| I understood "stacks" to be data structures with push and pop
| operations. This seems more like a sorting algorithm.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| check similar https://chooseit.sitesell.com/
|
| When i was looking at it (years ago) it lived in browser only. No
| idea how it is now.
|
| i didn't like the multi-page and remade it as all-on-one-html-
| page for my own usage
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| You are one recommendation from Uncle Bob away from becoming part
| of the next SaFE (Scalable Agile FSomething something) process -
| good luck :-)
|
| Make a Jira plugin and make your fortune :-)
| Artoooooor wrote:
| Checked it on something without any life impact - Minecraft base
| locations. Seems to work well. The biggest problem exists with
| elements on Pareto front - so I have to decide between good in
| one thing and good on another thing instead of good and worse.
| But pairwise comparison still helps to determine which tradeoff
| is better for me.
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(page generated 2025-02-25 23:02 UTC)