
Top Hacker News Submissions by Year: 2009–2015 - anton_tarasenko
https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/hackernews-top-submissions-by-year.md
======
alschwalm
For those (like me) wondering what became of that P != NP proof. It seems to
have generally been discredited (though not yet retracted). Note that I'm just
reporting what I found here:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458)

But I don't keep up with this area, so maybe the status of that work is more
contentious than Scott Aaronson makes it appear.

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anton_tarasenko
Updated: I've added submissions from 2006-2008. Now it includes the entire HN
history.

Also, ranking by category:
[https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/ha...](https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/hackernews-
top-submissions-by-category.md)

~~~
mdkras
This is great. It is very cool to see this link in the "way" back in 2007:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863).

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alanning
[http://sivers.org/kimo](http://sivers.org/kimo)

Thank you for letting me re-read "There is no speed limit" by Derek Sivers.

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dubin
If you enjoyed this you might also like Wayback HN, a past project of mine!
You can look at top posts by year, month, and day.
[http://www.waybackhn.com](http://www.waybackhn.com)

~~~
linhchi
This is really useful. I choose random year (month..) and pick the best of
these parameters. Some materials are timeless.

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kiloreux
One thing still bothers me as a techie is that the death of Steve Jobs ranked
first, and Dennis Ritchie 8th, I know that Hacker News is about business as
it's about tech, but I just think that the contributions of Dennis Ritchie to
our modern world compared to Steve Jobs are much bigger, I hope they both rest
in peace.

~~~
danso
It's indisputable that Steve Jobs is more of a household name than Dennis
Ritchie, even among techies, it's likely that Jobs and his accomplishments are
more well-known. The other thing to consider is that Ritchie lived a fairly
full life, reaching the age of 70. Steve Jobs died at 56. More importantly, he
died while basically at his peak...Apple had surpassed Exxon to become the
world's most valuable company in 2011, and by all accounts, Jobs still had
plenty of ideas and initiatives. So there's a special amount of tragedy
involved with Jobs.

There are a lot of unsung engineers and scientists who were happy to keep out
of the public eye. One of the things that Jobs did well was publicize himself
and make his ideas and opinions known -- and undoubtedly, his attitude and
drive pushed Apple to success...coincidentally, such a characteristic gets
more _notice_...so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jobs's death hits more
people.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'm a critic of Jobs, especially his legend, as much as someone respects him.
Yet, your comment rings true to my ears. Good summary.

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grecy
"Tim Cook Speaks up" as #1 in 2014.

Slightly related I was talking to some people the other day who are still
strongly against gay marriage and want the Supreme Court to go backwards.

I explained to them that the fantastic news is that in 15-20 years, it won't
even be called gay marriage, it's just marriage :)

If they still don't like it, we just have to wait until they die and the world
will move on without them.

~~~
brightball
Alabama actually has pending legislation right now that finally takes the
proper approach to this whole thing.

The state will simply record marriages reported to them. A person can be
married to one other person and outside of writing it down the state is no
longer involved. They actually cited the state getting involved with marriage
licensing a hundred years ago as due to legislative desire to prevent race
mixing.

Getting out of the process entirely is the most logical way to say "Enough,
there is no debate. Move on."

~~~
minikites
My simplistic understanding of history is that this is how marriage was in the
Western world for hundreds of years. Two people just said they agree to marry
and the local church would record it. No ring, no ceremony, just two people
agreeing.

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brobinson
The 2013 "NSA collecting everything you do" entry claims 611 comments and
1,689 points, but the thread linked to only has 1 point and is [dead]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133321)

~~~
nowarninglabel
Probably supposed to be this link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133349)

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nxzero
"why the lucky stiff" ...gone, but not forgot.

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fnayr
Interesting that a lot of the top rated articles over the year have been
political, not strictly (or sometimes even remotely) technical.

~~~
acemarke
In casual observation, I've found that to be the case in every
submission/comment site I've read (Slashdot, Reddit, HN, etc). The submissions
that seem to gather the most comments are always the ones about politics,
social drama, and "real-world" news.

~~~
ivl
Just taking a guess here: the really interesting technical submissions might
just appeal to the users who are fond of that subset of tech, but the
political ones have a broader interest? Or maybe it's that the technical
submissions don't really cause the same emotional response (well, barring
stuff like Heartbleed, or other serious issues in tech).

~~~
acemarke
Definitely both of those.

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brownbat
Outlawed by Amazon DRM (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392)
) tells the story of someone having their Kindle remotely wiped by Amazon with
no explanation. Someone in the comments claimed to work on the Kindle and said
some aspects of the story should not be technically possible.

Was there ever any followup to this mystery?

Either Amazon's explanation, or clarification of what happened on the device?

Some of the stories in the top make perfect sense. Other stories look a little
odd in hindsight...

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dangoldin
Something interesting is that the top score seems to have peaked in 2011 with
4339. No score since then broke 4000 and there were two that didn't break
3000.

One interpretetation is that there's a lot more posting going on and it's hard
for a single post to maintain a top spot as well as potential changes to the
ranking alogrithm. Another option may be less engaged users. Maybe a mix of
both.

~~~
dang
It's affected by algorithm changes. For example, the software now downweights
any story that's 18 hours or older, with the intention of flushing the front
page so that the stories with largest inertia don't just sit there.

I doubt it's that users are less engaged. It appears that HN had its most
active Sunday ever today in terms of unique visitors. I've been meaning to
look at some graphs of number of comments over time because it feels like
those have gone up lately, too. If anybody else wants to make them, the data's
public...

~~~
dangoldin
Ah interesting. I was thinking even if the algorithm didn't change the volume
could have had a side effect on it. Do you expose the history of the
algorithm?

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dc2
Is Hacker News declining in terms of visits?

The voting seemed to peak out in 2012 / 2013\. Not just the top vote, compare
all of them.

~~~
akerro
2012 and 2013 were very sad years apparently and we had to make it clear that
you can't do anything to "fix" the net.

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spatulon
This is missing dfranke's "How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security
advisory)" which was the top submission in 2009.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976)

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mbesto
What's funny is how many of them are from, about or feature something from
Michael Arrington.

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minimaxir
More info on the Hacker News BigQuery dataset:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)

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briholt
There seems to be a trend of increasing political posts over time.

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gailees
Notice any other trends while messing with the data?

~~~
anton_tarasenko
I had, but didn't publish. Any particular topics of interest?

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benbenolson
Steve Jobs' death, rank 1; Dennis Ritchie's death, rank 18? That's a little
sad.

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aslammuet
Many of em not available.

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jimmaswell
It's arguable if Steve Jobs should get peace

~~~
dang
Please don't post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments here.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952)
and marked it off-topic.

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c3534l
Kinda disappointing, really. "Top" clearly doesn't mean best in this case.

~~~
nxzero
"Top" rarely means best.

