

Comparing Hacker News & the Slashdot Effect - CmdrTacoMalda
http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/

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icefox
Almost 10% of us are mobile. On a small screen with slower bandwidth HN is a
lot nicer than /. Almost annoying that even though the site is so efficient
already the site icon and the logo aren't the same url or that the arrows are
not unicode arrows or just one image rotates or ... :)

~~~
wgx
Agree about "Y", I often tap it and end up at YC when expecting HN.

~~~
icefox
Given that it does go to YC it makes even more sense to have it be the YC site
icon so if the YC guys ever change that logo/icon HN would automatically get
it. Then again a lot of mobile browser don't fetch the site icon so couldn't
it just be a 'Y' in an orange box with no icon fetching at all?

~~~
icefox
Looking at the code one way to speed up the total site load time would be to
have the main page be static and completely cachable. onload have it fetch a
list of articles and populate the main page. This way it would fetch the
articles and images all at the same time v.s generating the main page, and
then fetching the resources.

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petercooper
_In other words, Slashdot sent fewer people, but they stuck around a little
longer._

His hunch is that it relates to the story. My hunch is that HN users usually
have many links to read through on any particular visit, whereas Slashdot's
post level is low enough that you can spend 10 minutes on a single item.
They're pretty chalk and cheese as far as experiences go.

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
That's a good point, although the question is on HN and SD, what % of items do
users actually click on? While HN has far more single news items, Slashdot has
a lot of comments, and the articles themselves are longer. Apples & Oranges to
be sure.

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revorad
I'm surprised to learn that as many as 2% of Hacker News visitors use IE. Why?
Who are you?

~~~
pflats
My employer (a public school system) has blocked everything but IE9 on port 80
to keep students from using proxies/tunneling/[other firewall avoidance
method].

~~~
AndrewDucker
I'm curious - do they check the user agent? Or something more complex?

~~~
chuinard
It could be a Windows domain policy. Active Directory is a really powerful
management tool.

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jcr
Hey Rob!

The person who squatted 'cmdrtaco' on HN claims to be saving it for you, and
they put contact details in the profile.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco>

BTW, you must be new here ;)

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dabeeeenster
I just get "Error establishing a database connection" which is some sort of
delicious irony...

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veyron
Is there still a CmdrTaco user? <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTaco>
says no ...

~~~
krosaen
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTacoMalda>

~~~
mbreese
That isn't the question... The question is, is there anyone squatting in the
username cmdrtaco? I hope not, because that's just not cool.

~~~
prawn
There was someone squatting the username and they posted in the last Taco HN
submission asking Malda to contact them via email (listed in their profile) to
claim the account. He may not have seen that or just not mentioned in this
write-up.

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wgx
I wrote a similar post a couple of weeks back from my (shorter) stint on HN:
<http://willgrant.org/hn-traffic-stats-summary/>

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0x12
It looks as though the HN effect has brought down the site. At last. Maybe 16
cents didn't quite cut it after all.

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jvc26
Um ... I'm guessing what this says is that the HN effect takes down the site?

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twsted
As CmdrTaco says, two things reveals that HN users are a little more 'on the
edge': more Chrome users, more mobile users. BTW, HN seems to have also _more_
Safari users, even if he says the opposite.

~~~
mtogo
Subjective. I use Firefox because it's a more stable, modern, and featureful
browser than Chromium in my opinion. That doesn't make one of us more "on the
edge" than the other.

You're basically saying that since one community prefers strawberry ice cream
to chocolate, they're more modern somehow.

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paulsocal
worst post ive ever read

