1.3 million Hacker News stories tell a tale

[minimaxir]

> I’ve commited a grave statistical faux-pas in this article. Did you spot it? I showed that the number of votes a Hacker News story gets is correlated with the time it is submitted. Then, I told you that submitting your story at a particular time will cause it to have a higher chance of success. Correlation does not imply causation, however, so this is unproven. It is entirely possible that stories submitted on the weekend have simply been better than those submitted on weekdays, or that weekend readers are “vote-happy”. However, my intuition suggests to me that it is most likely that there is true causation here.

You probably should have led with that caveat. Ignoring it completely for the sake of an argument is misleading.

Relatedly, "what if I told you I found an easy way to increase your story’s votes by 172%?" is flat-out wrong. That metric implies an average behavior, which is not the case here.

[mcrowe]

You're right. I was focused on telling a useful story with the data. I should be more careful not to be misleading.

Your related point is a good catch. That was a brain slip on my part. Thanks for pointing it out!

[mtmail]

Same story from 6 hours ago, this time with '#hn' added to the URL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068983

If you found the solution when/if a story gets picked up by time-of-day then why submit it again? (I'm making an ironic joke)

[minimaxir]

Huh, the OP also used two different submission titles. That alone invalidates the time-causality argument. :P

[mcrowe]

Haha. Actually, Hacker News admin sent me an email asking me to re-submit it with a slightly different URL.

[mcrowe]

I looked at the data from 1.3 million Hacker News stories and found that when a story gets submitted makes a big difference (up to 172% better chance of getting on the front page). This article shows the analysis and results.

I used the official Hacker News API to get the stories using Python, and used R and ggplot2 to do the exploratory data analysis and plots.

[pedalpete]

Interesting, I wonder if there is a difference in discovery rate of 'Ask HN:' submissions vs. others.

[mcrowe]

Yes. "Ask HN" and "Show HN" both do almost twice as well as standard stories.