

How I hacked Hacker News - mcrowe
http://www.dataphoric.com/how-i-hacked-hacker-news/

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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%). 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.

------
senorprogrammer
I would love to see a meta-analysis of the 'when to post on HN' articles to
see if a) there's consistency, and b) if the stories themselves have skewed
subsequent conclusions (i.e.: will everyone now post at 7:45 on Sunday
morning?)

~~~
mcrowe
Absolutely! The "success metric" will be different for different analyses,
though, which would make that tough. The obvious choice is to look at the mean
number of votes for stories submitted at different times. I looked at a binary
condition instead: the fraction of stories which get more than N votes. This
biases things less towards "super-star" stories which get tons of votes, and
focuses on whether a story gets discovered at all.

There is a bunch of analysis I did behind the scenes to motivate this choose.
I'll be posting the source code for my analysis, so it will be easy for anyone
to critique and compare.

