
Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News - dd367
http://debarghyadas.com/writes/2015/11/08/looking-back-at-9-years-of-hacker-news/
======
kristopolous
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](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.

~~~
dd367
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).

~~~
kristopolous
I'd like to postulate that the average disposable income of an active hn user
is probably, with respect to forums of the same class as hn (metafilter,
reddit, digg, etc) one of the highest. (There's been historical self-reported
polls eg.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725)
\- 44% of respondents are in the top 10% income, ~25% are in the top 5% and
~4% are in the top 1%)

I'd also like to postulate that if you were to segment the market into "early
adopters", hn would have a larger share of this segment then other forums in
the same class, of an equivalent or greater volume of traffic.

If this postulation is correct, then effectively hn is "trendsetters with
money" ... a good group to listen to.

I don't have data to back these claims up, but intuitively I feel they are
pretty safe.

This of course doesn't give any indication of market velocity. I've done a
number of investments based on HN at the wrong velocity - I presumed the stock
had been undervalued because of hn content, when in fact, the market had YET
to undervalue it. I forecasted a distant chance of success given an
undervalued stock (in this case blackberry) - knowing that they were going to
do an android with a physical keyboard <eventually>, and I invested upon this
speculation --- well before the market doubted the future of the company.

As a result, I bought it way early and it fell precipitously and is only
rebounding slightly now. So no, this isn't a magic sauce to time the events or
how they will affect the market price, just perhaps one to forecast their
eventuality.

------
minimaxir
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/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

Analyzing comments: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254)

~~~
kbenson
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. ;)

~~~
minimaxir
Granted, the primary reason I had written that Pokemon article was because the
response of tech media outlets was essentially "lol weirdos" when the
mechanics are pretty interesting.

------
braythwayt
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
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!

~~~
id
Posthaven[1] (by the founders of Posterous), Svbtle[2] and Ghost[3] come to my
mind.

[1] [https://posthaven.com/](https://posthaven.com/)

[2] [https://svbtle.com/](https://svbtle.com/)

[3] [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

------
arasmussen
> 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.

~~~
dd367
Math is hard.

------
wazari972
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
... ?

~~~
dd367
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!

~~~
richardboegli
Please leave them in UTC if possible. I do realise from your data that the
bulk of readership of HN is US based.

------
tcdent
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
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.

~~~
icefox
In a way reddit is the ultimate model. When the main room gets to big you can
go and make a new room (subreddits), but still in the same house where
everyone else is. Brilliant model in my opinion and one that I believe will be
followed by successful future discussion board systems in years to come.

~~~
mjn
An in-between option is the [http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs) model of
having tags on stories, and letting users filter on tags. Allows me to ignore
a few topics I just don't care about, without really splitting the community
(some of the community opts-out of a few topics here and there, but it's by
and large one community).

------
danso
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
4\. Pythons

~~~
TeMPOraL
5\. Beeminders

6\. Pigeons[0]

[0] - [http://blog.flypigeon.co/our-application-to-y-
combinators-w1...](http://blog.flypigeon.co/our-application-to-y-
combinators-w16/)

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

~~~
mjn
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](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html)

------
DanBC
> 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?

~~~
dd367
It's just submissions - I think I should go over and make the wording less
ambiguous.

~~~
DanBC
OK, cool. EDIT: I forgot to say this is a cool submission!

There are people who submit about 5 items per day, so I'd be mildly interested
to see how many people submit eg more than one article per day.

~~~
dd367
Running this query:

SELECT author, COUNT(1) AS c FROM [fh-bigquery:hackernews.stories] WHERE
author IS NOT NULL GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 1000

and armed with the knowledge that HN has been in existence for 3158 days,
there are 11 people who post strictly more than once a day. They are: 1 cwan
7077 2 shawndumas 6602 3 evo_9 5659 4 nickb 4322 5 iProject 4266 6 bootload
4212 7 edw519 3844 8 ColinWright 3766 9 nreece 3724 10 tokenadult 3659 11
Garbage 3538 Just under 1 a day: robg 3121

~~~
shawndumas
I don't have a problem... really; I don't need an intervention.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Have you checked your profile settings page recently? There's a cute option
called "noprocrast" there. Much cheaper than a visit to a specialist. ;).

(seriously though: keep on submitting!)

------
bootload
_" 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
My bad, fixed.

~~~
bootload
thx @dd267, not bad by the way, this is an amazing post. Did this post by
@minimaxir inspire this work? ~ [http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-
about-comments/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/)

~~~
dd367
Not really :P I wish I'd seen it before. I only learnt about it when minimaxir
commented on this thread.

------
JacobAldridge
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
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
> _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.

------
ca98am79
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...](http://blog.park.io/articles/hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld/)

------
pavornyoh
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

~~~
minimaxir
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.

------
auston
Does anyone know who nickb is?

~~~
JacobAldridge
It's now part of "ancHNt history" (nickb hasn't posted for 6+ years). I did
recall some discussion about nickb = pg, but don't think I had seen the
'smoking gun'. Noting how Reddit was started, I'm neither surprised nor
concerned if there was such an account in the early days (either by pg or by
the yc partners).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb)

[2] Smoking gun?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151461)

~~~
JacobAldridge
[Edit] Dammit. Now I've read Alex3917's response, I wish I'd done the accurate
calculations on that "Smoking Gun" link to note it was posted on 1 April,
2008.

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

[edit: spelling]

------
cperciva
_Colin Perceival_

s/ei/i/g

~~~
dd367
fixed.

~~~
cperciva
Thanks!

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

~~~
sdegutis
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.

~~~
Zikes
But it is broke, and needs fixed. The site is nigh unusable on a mobile
browser, for instance.

~~~
moises_silva
Agreed. I've been using this on my phone:
[http://hackerwebapp.com/](http://hackerwebapp.com/)

Works pretty well.

~~~
richardboegli
Thanks for this.

I'm using the web version and it is so much better than the mobile changes
that have just been rolled out.

As it stood my reading of HN was about to decrease exponentially with this new
flat comment style.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531710)

But I'll be using
[http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/](http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/)
now.

