4 Years of HN Traffic

[pg]

http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-5mar12.png

[andrewhillman]

I am curious to know what that huge spike in Dec was.

[tom6a → andrewhillman]

MSM links create traffic spikes. There is a (somewhat small) spike in August that pg attributed to a PC World article. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865985 and the article here http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...

Perhaps the Dec spike is from the Inquirer article which links to HN. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2130668/facebook-pr...

[philco → andrewhillman]

SOPA + Reddit blackout I think?

[i_cannot_hack → philco]

The SOPA blackout was on January 18, more than a month after the traffic spike.

[willvarfar]

Somewhat tangentially related: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...

My own numbers from just a few months of sampling

What the heck: here it is on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3670178

[ahsanhilal]

So from pg's profile it seem like HN has been around for almost 5.5 years. I haven't been around HN for that long, but was HN initially private and 4 years ago gave access to public? Would be interested to know.

[mixmax → ahsanhilal]

No, it was public from the start - the ID's are sequential, so you can go back and see what the first submissions were.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={a rather smallish number}

[tintin]

And still using one server? One thing I learned from PG is to first look at your code before upgrading the hardware.

[snprbob86 → tintin]

I asked pg in Oct 2011:

"One server. An Intel Xeon E5450 with 12 GB RAM." [1]

That's pretty damn impressive.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3079442

[joshAg]

any chance of releasing the data behind the two graphs? i'd love to see these on a log scale or with percent growth.

[tomedme]

Interesting weekly patterns.

I'd also be curious to match up the spikes of traffic with significant news (01/2012 3rd week, 12/2011 2nd week, etc).

Thanks for sharing!

[slyall → tomedme]

Using http://hhn.domador.net to look at previous pages I would guess that.

3rd week of Jan 2012 ( http://hhn.domador.net/2012/01/18/23/ ) was all the SOPA/PIPA news.

2nd week of Dec was less obvious. I am guessing a major site linked to HN but scanning through the stories I am not sure exactly which one it would be for.

[hinathan]

Thanks for the data! Playing with OCR engines lately has gotten me into the habit of wanting to turn static bitmaps into searchable and transformable data. I haven't taken a crack at graphs yet but it looks like things like http://plotdigitizer.sourceforge.net/ might be up for it.

[cobychapple]

Thanks for posting! Nothing like steady, consistent growth.

It would be interesting to overlay prominent events (e.g. the passing of Steve Jobs and so forth) on this to see if/how the spikes correspond.

[instakill]

Looking at the graphs, HN really isn't a weekend platform.

[chmike → instakill]

We shouldn't submit new entries on week-end or at end december. But this would amplify the oscillations.

[cdvonstinkpot]

I seem to recall there used to be a 'Mixpanel' logo at the footer of the page. Is HN still using them, & is that where these graphs came from?

[asciident → cdvonstinkpot]

These graphs look like matplotlib charts. I'm assuming pg just dumped the numbers and wrote a 5 line python script to make the chart.

[yemkay]

Thrilled to know, this world has 150K hackers

[mbel → yemkay]

I'd rather say it's far less than that. Remember that single reader can access hn via multiple devices and access points, so unique IP count doesn't really feel representative.

[patrickk → mbel]

Yes, good point - I'm guessing many people would access HN from both home and work, to name just one scenario.

[benjaminwootton → yemkay]

You do realise it's 1.5 million on the Y axis!?

[dkasper → benjaminwootton]

That's page views, not users. ;-)

[notatoad]

i'm pretty sure that's the most linear and predictable traffic graph i've ever seen.

[willvarfar → notatoad]

You predicted the steady growth of HN?

[leeskye]

Would be cool to see this graph with a column chart.

[zackattack]

Can WA parse this image into a function of time?

[nraynaud]

Where's the hockey stick ?

[tern]

Strange, I coincidentally dreamt about pg having posted stats today. I didn't bother to look assuming he would never do that.