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Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News

207 points| dd367 | 10 years ago |debarghyadas.com | reply

79 comments

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[+] kristopolous|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] patio11|10 years ago|reply
Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.

The same signal would have also fired, much more strongly, from August 2013 through December 2013. The LPs of the VC firms who share your view of its predictive power are presently not very happy.

[+] dd367|10 years ago|reply
That's a super interesting thought. You should consider that the sum total of popularity of topics on HN up till today can't be used in hindsight as a predictor. It would be interesting to see if we merely looked for past spikes in keywords and used that to govern investment decisions. Even then, I fear that for every "bitcoin" and "apple", there may be other technologies and companies (especially smaller startups) that didn't work out so well, although I hypothesize a net positive.

Despite it being public data, because the information circulated on HN is at the core of technology, it could prove valuable to investors with limited knowledge of it (and might well be worth packaging and selling, haha).

[+] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
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

[+] kbenson|10 years ago|reply
The Pokemon story you show in an example (and you wrote and submitted) looked interesting so I looked it up. I recall now that I had started reading it but never got through more than the beginning, because I got totally sidetracked by Twitch plays Pokemon which you linked to in the very beginning of your article. I guess I get to revisit and read that, so thanks. ;)
[+] blueside|10 years ago|reply
I've always been interested in seeing a statistic that shows how often the top comment is a negative comment that attempts to controvert the original story.
[+] dd367|10 years ago|reply
Oh damn, super cool stuff. I wish I'd seen this before. Looks like I replicated a lot of your work, but yeah trends seem to have stayed the same.
[+] braythwayt|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] edw519|10 years ago|reply
I still haven't found anything that made it so easy for a regular person to become a better essayist, in volume or quality, than Posterous and its auto email feature. Boy, how I miss it.

I'm a lazy programmer who would love to blog again, but needs something as easy as Posterous. Any suggestions, anyone?

FWIW raganwald, you're one of those who people should continue to pay attention to, even 140 characters at a time. I know I do. Please keep 'em coming!

[+] arasmussen|10 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] wazari972|10 years ago|reply
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 ... ?
[+] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
As someone from Europe: This looks exactly like the 15h UTC peak in most US websites and chats when all the Americans come on.

The peak starts at 12h UTC, is largest at 18h UTC, and goes down at midnight UTC – exactly what I’m used from US people in the chats I am,

and exactly 4am PST, 10am PST, and 4pm PST.

or 8am Eastern Time, 4pm Eastern Time, and 10pm Eastern Time.

Which is Silicon Valley Morning/Workday, East Coast Workday, and European Evening.

Same as reddit.

[+] dd367|10 years ago|reply
I should've mentioned that all the times are in UTC. I'll work on normalizing them to PST - it's pretty confusing right now. Thanks for letting me know!
[+] tcdent|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
It seems the trend with everything, people want to close the door behind them. They should have only allowed 16-bits of user ids on slashdot.
[+] danso|10 years ago|reply
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

[+] KC8ZKF|10 years ago|reply
4. Pythons
[+] saisi|10 years ago|reply
I wonder where unicorn(s) would rank if included
[+] waterlesscloud|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] paloaltokid|10 years ago|reply
grellas isn't mentioned on here? He writes some of the highest-quality posts on HN.
[+] mjn|10 years ago|reply
By "contributors", the linked post means article submissions rather than comments, and grellas doesn't submit a lot of articles.

I wrote an overview of the 20 users with most total karma points (submissions+comments) about two years ago, which he is on when you count that way. Maybe still interesting: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html

[+] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
> 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?

[+] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
Not only that he stopped more than a year ago so the average was higher while his account was active.
[+] dd367|10 years ago|reply
It's just submissions - I think I should go over and make the wording less ambiguous.
[+] bootload|10 years ago|reply
"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

[+] dd367|10 years ago|reply
My bad, fixed.
[+] JacobAldridge|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] dang|10 years ago|reply
The one time pg got super mad at me was when I triggered the second Erlang stampede. It was the evening of Demo Day by the time he saw the front page full of nothing but Erlang stories and he had to go through them on his phone and kill them all manually. He then searched to figure out who had started it and... mea culpa.
[+] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] pavornyoh|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
I've worked with this dataset.

Since the dataset is derived from the official HN API, there is no tabulation for Comment Karma, which will result in misleading rankings if attempting to reverse-engineer overall karma.

[+] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
He's ranking submitters and commenters, right? I almost never submit.
[+] auston|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone know who nickb is?
[+] Alex3917|10 years ago|reply
I don't know who he is, but he's not Paul Graham. The story behind that is that pg emailed me on April Fool's asking me to help him with a hoax to make it look like he was really nickb, who was the most prolific contributor on the site at the time. pg just manually changed the account name on a reply to make it look like he was accidentally replying under the wrong username, and my job was to submit a story looking like I had discovered this.

(This was also already publicly discussed somewhere on HN previously, albeit several years ago.)

[+] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
If Paul Graham is involved with that account, he's not the only person; there are 'nickb posts that don't sound at all like things PG would write.
[+] ternaryoperator|10 years ago|reply
Two main themes of the top 100: Death of a respected person or shutdown of a popular company.

[edit: spelling]

[+] omegote|10 years ago|reply
9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...
[+] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
9 years ago, separation of presentation and content was already considered a good practice. Yet here we are with application frameworks and component-based designs that throw it all out the window...

To expect any consistent design principles on a development medium as ad-hoc and devoid of principles as the web, is wishful thinking.

[+] sdegutis|10 years ago|reply
HN isn't about using good practices. It's about getting to the heart of the matter. Content is content, who cares how it's displayed, for better or worse. But people keep showing up. So it must be working just fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.