

4 Years of HN Traffic - pg
http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-5mar12.png

======
willvarfar
Somewhat tangentially related:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddit-
vs-hacker-news-vs-twitter)

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>

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

~~~
philco
SOPA + Reddit blackout I think?

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

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

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

~~~
willvarfar
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 ?

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

