
Tracking an Item on Hacker News - ColinWright
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TrackingAnItemOnHackerNews.html?HN_20150505
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gus_massa
There is a similar/simpler tool to trace the position of any submission:
[http://hnrankings.info/9406965/](http://hnrankings.info/9406965/)

It has less resolution (and don't measure the hits), but you don't have to
configure your own HN scraper.

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ColinWright
I use HNRankings all the time to see how things have been going, but in this
case I was interested in the specific relationship between hits/min and the
ranking on the front page. It's obvious that being on the front page generates
more hits, but I wanted to quantify that. HNRankings just shows an item's
points and ranking over time - I needed more.

The scraping is trivial - I just used grep and sed to extract the bits I was
interested in.

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phreeza
I would guess that this also depends a lot on the item itself. Sites regularly
collapse under the load from HN, and I think almost any hosting solution
should be able to handle ~0.7 hits/second.

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laurentsabbah
Regularly, was just browsing a cool Berlin 1945 and Berlin today website,
everything was smooth until it made it to HN!

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gcatalfamo
I like your findings, although I would add that the secs/hit depends a lot not
just on the rank but also on the time of the observation.

8PM PST will surely have different secs/hit from 8PM CET

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ColinWright
That's certainly true, although I think it would be a reasonable simplifying
assumption to say that the time-effect would be a constant, that there would
be a multiplier to apply, and that would make a correction for the time slot.
We can't submit the same item in different time slots to test this, because
enough people would recognise it as a duplicate so as to skew the results.

The "clickbaityness" of the title would also affect the hits/min, as would the
actual subject matter.

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creack
There is also [http://hnwatcher.com](http://hnwatcher.com) :)

