from Hacker News

Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News

by dd367 on 11/9/15, 7:29 PM with 79 comments

  • by kristopolous on 11/9/15, 9:35 PM

    The investment fidelity of this information is likely pretty high - not necessarily with this analysis ... but investment picks from topics popular on hn (ex: tesla, bitcoin, apple, amazon[ec2]) were ahead of the market.

    Products, services, or companies repeatedly lauded in the comment section, in my experience, are remarkably indicative of future broader trends.

    For instance, this user, in 2010, lamented about the rampant bitcoin discussions as excessively overflowing on hn like some irritating internet meme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998630 ... at the time of posting, bitcoins were selling for $0.06 each. Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.

    I can imagine an arb-style subscription to the right sql queries could be packaged and resold for extremely good profit to the right people.

  • by minimaxir on 11/9/15, 8:38 PM

    See also my personal HN analyses, although they are atleast a year old but the overall trends are still unchanged.

    Analyzing submissions: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/

    Analyzing comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

    More recently I made a few charts about upvote probability by time slot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254

  • by braythwayt on 11/9/15, 10:17 PM

    Bittersweet:

    My old Posterous blog is one of the top domains ranked by average upvotes. That says something about the time when I was a better and/or more prolific essayist... And something about walled gardens.

  • by arasmussen on 11/9/15, 9:58 PM

    > As of 13th October, 2015, out of nearly 2 million Hacker News (1,959,809) submissions, merely 217 have managed to rake up over 1000 upvotes. That's about one out of every 2000 posts.

    Math is hard. One out of every 9031 posts.

  • by wazari972 on 11/9/15, 8:17 PM

    On the graph of total posts over the days of the week, do you know what time and timezone are the peaks? it seems very regular, like if only one/a few timezones where concerned. Do we have such a little posting power in Europe ... ?

  • by tcdent on 11/9/15, 9:01 PM

    Pretty interesting that the daily post volume has plateaued.

    Personally, I'm glad the growth has been curbed. Too bad we can go back to the good ol' days.

  • by danso on 11/9/15, 10:43 PM

    I've been meaning to do a content analysis for most popular animal among HN users, based on subject in headlines. My guess is something along this order:

    1. Cats

    2. Honeybees

    3. Dolphins

  • by waterlesscloud on 11/9/15, 11:00 PM

    Interesting to see who some top usernames are. Also interesting how little I care who anyone who posts here actually is in real life. All about that post quality, gents.

  • by paloaltokid on 11/9/15, 9:11 PM

    grellas isn't mentioned on here? He writes some of the highest-quality posts on HN.

  • by DanBC on 11/9/15, 8:02 PM

    > With a runaway total of over 7000 posts on Hacker News, Clement Wan averages 2.24 posts a day since Hacker News took off (It's been 3,158 days since Feb 19, 2007). Two very mysterious users appear on this list.

    Is this submissions and comments, or just subs, or just comments?

  • by bootload on 11/9/15, 9:29 PM

    "6 bootload 4212 28759 Peter Renshaw, British creative learning consultant and researcher"

    A quick inspection of user id would have confirmed this. Should read:

    6 bootload 4212 28759 PR Programmer, Melbourne, Australia

  • by JacobAldridge on 11/9/15, 10:34 PM

    I'd like to see 'Erlang' on the WordTrends graph, though the plateau of story volumes may mean we can void that eternal September failsafe.

  • by TeMPOraL on 11/10/15, 7:06 AM

    > To me, the most surprising entry was Kalzumeus, which I've never heard of.

    'dd367, as you probably are aware by now, Kalzumeus is the company/blog of 'patio11.

    Anyway, thanks for the great analysis! One thing that surprised me was the word "lisp" not appearing in "Most Commonly Upvoted Words" table.

  • by ca98am79 on 11/11/15, 7:28 PM

    In case anyone is interested, I broke down the posts on HN by TLD in a blog post a couple months ago: http://blog.park.io/articles/hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld...

  • by pavornyoh on 11/9/15, 8:26 PM

    I have to disagree with the most upvoted contributors in the article. The #1 on here has over 200,000 karma points. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

  • by auston on 11/9/15, 8:34 PM

    Does anyone know who nickb is?

  • by ternaryoperator on 11/10/15, 8:43 AM

    Two main themes of the top 100: Death of a respected person or shutdown of a popular company.

    [edit: spelling]

  • by cperciva on 11/10/15, 7:37 AM

    Colin Perceival

    s/ei/i/g

  • by omegote on 11/9/15, 7:45 PM

    9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...