
HN now serving a million page views on weekdays - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#9feb11
======
edw519
_As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand unique
visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays._

Funny, before jacquesm retired from hn last week: 90,001 unique visitors and 2
million page views per day.

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for+all+the+Bits)

(just kidding - we miss you, jacquesm. ping us sometime)

~~~
enko
Let's have a break from the incestuous cross-pollination on HN please.

Frankly if HN had an option to ignore all posts from the top 10 leaderboard I
would opt in to that; I am sick and tired of this entirely irrelevant person-
specific drama.

------
lionhearted
Congratulations and much gratitude to you Paul, all of the YC team, and all of
the editors for tireless and thankless work to keep things running well.

> As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand
> unique visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays. (Http requests and
> page views are identical except for votes, of which there are about 25
> thousand on a weekday.)

Interesting, interesting... btw, one set of stats I was curious on - got any
numbers on how many people who browse are registered and what percent of
registered users vote? I'd be fascinated to hear about it if the numbers are
handy and not confidential.

Thanks again and congrats on news.yc and all the recent cool developments and
successes at incubating.

------
mrspeaker
A million! Imagine how much bandwidth HN could save if each comment didn't use
nested font tags and inline styles ;)

~~~
seiji
Or gzip for that matter. :)

gzipping this thread page results in a 5x size decrease.

Can't blame pg though. He's just a product of his computational adolescence.
In another 15 years, we'll still be using CSS and divs while the kids move on
to 3D direct brain interface temporal markup languages.

~~~
ElbertF
Or tables with spacer images. What is this, 1995?

------
antirez
HN is my favorite site, what a wonderful community. PG: thank you for putting
it together.

However, the site is not fast, seriously, a site that's so simple containing
just a few text should be blazingly fast. It does not take too much science to
reach this goal.

I understand that it can be interesting running it via an Arc program, but you
hit millions of page views, and there are people that are using this site
every day to get together, to share their knowledge, and so forth, and it's a
shame that there is to wait too much at every page view.

~~~
pg
Do you mean it's slow now, or that it was slow a week ago? It doesn't seem
slow to me now.

~~~
antirez
It is no longer too slow, but still not as fast as it could be. I must admit,
my experience is filtered by the fact that I'm in Italy and I guess there are
many hops between me and the HN servers, but still loading pages seems to take
something in the order of one second.

Being the layout very simple to render, no graphics, there are all the
prerequisites to make the HN experience "google alike" from the point of view
of latency.

~~~
zepolen
What is your ping latency? I get about 200ms from Greece, site doesn't load
blazing fast but it's usable, nowhere near 1 second.

~~~
antirez
From Italy ping latency is 200ms, but page loading is veeery slow (1.3 seconds
for home page, 3 seconds for comment pages if they are not too big).

So I tried form UK (linode server):

<https://gist.github.com/820303>

Ping latency from linode is 100 ms.

So my bad experience is clearly the combination of two things: HN is slow
generating pages, taking something like one third of second to generate the
home page. Add this to the latency and you are half a second for the home, and
more for than 600 ms for comment pages.

This in the UK. In Italy there is apparently also some bandwidth issue, and
since the markup is pretty verbose compared to the content, this could be
dramatically improved too.

For instance Google.co.uk is served in 73 ms from the same place.

My blog takes 300 ms from my crappy ASDL (the same where hacker news takes 1.4
seconds).

There are huge margins for improvements.

~~~
zepolen
Site seems to have slowed for me too now. Especially the front page. Gzip
would probably help with the bandwidth issue but I don't think that's at
fault.

I wonder if pg would accept a yc news written in python/redis :)

~~~
antirez
I can't propose a so biased implementation ;) A faster HN is already a big
enough gift.

------
barrkel
> _Judging from the classic view, the stories on the frontpage are not much
> different from those we'd have had in the first year_

I'll repeat (the gist of) my comment in a less crowded context
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157384>):

First-year users will only vote on what they see, and if they don't
consistently use the classic view - which I expect very few would - then they
will most likely only vote on what everyone else has voted on. Thus, classic
wouldn't be expected to be significantly different from the regular home page,
and thus it cannot measure any decline.

~~~
pg
_thus it cannot measure any decline_

That's not true unless those users are somehow compelled to upvote a constant
number of stories, which they're not. I upvote a smaller proportion of stories
on the frontpage than I used to.

~~~
barrkel
I almost never vote on anything that's not already on the front page; mind
you, I seldom vote up more than two or three stories per day.

Assuming that the number of first-year users' votes is noise compared to votes
from newer users, and that first-year users vote mostly on items on the front
page, then looking their votes alone should just give a different sort order
to that front page. That's my intuition, without taking into account ranking
algorithms using quadratic decay etc., but I'm not sure there's a good reason
to think that would change things.

~~~
Jsarokin
I'm not sure how accurate your assumption that new users are voters on the
homepage is.

As a new user, most of my votes are on the "New" section rather than the
homepage. I vote up the things that I think other people should (on New),
rather than what everyone is going to see anyways because its up on the front
page.

I do think that some sort of weight system for upvotes would be an interesting
feature.

~~~
BrandonM
You're actually helping to make his point. You're a new user; you help
determine what hits the front page by voting in the "New" section.

barrkel is extrapolating his own behavior as an older member: he tends to only
consider front page items for upvotes.

Thus, new users determine what makes the front page, all users help determine
the front page ordering, and "classic" view reflects how old users would order
the front page.

The question is whether barrkel's voting patterns are an appropriate model for
older members. Personally (as another older member), I visit "New" perhaps
once a week, but when I do I'm much more likely to vote up a story that I find
to have even a little bit of value. I only vote up front page stories that I
find extraordinarily useful or interesting.

There is no reason to assume that the interaction model used by barrkel and me
are representative of all older members, so while his argument is interesting,
it's not very well supported.

~~~
barrkel
Actually, there is evidence to support my model: the fact that classic front
page is very similar to the normal front page, except with a different sorting
order.

This evidence can be interpreted in (at least) two ways, (a) that most voting
occurs based on the front page, or (b) that the front page topic themes, and
by extrapolation user tastes, have remained consistent over time.

I (based on my own voting, and now yours too, but also the number of votes
front-page articles get vs stuff that doesn't make it to the front page,
evident from resubmission successes etc.) would guess that hypothesis (a) is
more likely than hypothesis (b); but in any case, the fact that there's an
alternative explanation for the similarity in the two front pages means that
PG's hypothesis of (b) is on shaky ground.

------
Sukotto
pg, please consider including the _year_ in the dates on the news page.

~~~
nicholasjbs
As a stopgap fix, the anchor links for the news items include the year.
Obviously not ideal, but useful if you're really curious or confused about one
of them.

------
webwright
I know this is a contentious question, but have you ever considered turning HN
into a business with YC as the primary investor? The question is: could you
advance it as a business without killing the magic and the splash benefit to Y
Combinator. I think the answer to both is yes.

~~~
alexophile
In many ways, I think that's already what it is. HN was created to, and still
does, serve the purposes of YC. I don't know where the money comes from to
keep it up and running, but I would imagine it's part of the YC operating
budget.

In short, I'm sure the value it represents now is far greater than what one
could garner from trying to directly monetize it. Just look at any of pgs
posts - people upvote the bejeezus out of them: he can _instantly and
effortlessly_ access thousands of high quality eyeballs.

There are surely people that would pay egregious sums of money to have this
kind of community in any vertical, and tech startups are pretty hot - I
struggle to even fathom what could possibly constitute a fair price for
jeopardizing that.

[edit: Google says it's spelled 'bejeezus']

~~~
jackowayed
It's also amazing leadgen for YC. That's partially because of PG's direct
ability to get things like "apps are open" to the top spot, but also just
because if you use HN regularly, you get a good impression of YC and are
constantly reminded that it exists.

------
staunch
HN became my favorite site when it launched, it's my favorite site now, and I
expect it will be my favorite site four years from now.

Thanks for keeping it good.

~~~
pmjordan
Nomen est omen? :-)

------
Jsarokin
Hopefully with the amount of hits and new users the site is getting, quality
doesn't decline. HN has (In a matter of 4 days) taken the #1 spot on my
"TechNews" bookmark folder, so as of now the article quality is great.

As a new user, I'm quite surprised with how civil and helpful everyone is.

Often times when you put a lot of extremely intelligent and strong-minded
people in the same place, things can get heated really quickly. Granted,
strong-minded people are usually not offended easily.

------
cosgroveb
Thank you, Paul for running an amazing site. I think I get a lot of value out
of it. I hope YComibnator does, too.

------
misterbwong
Congrats to the yc crew. It's no easy task to cultivate a community while
keeping quality high.

As a side note, does anyone know what kind of hardware setup they are using to
serve up HN?

------
iuguy
I'd congratulate you but I'm not sure if that's the right thing. It is hopeful
to see that the quality isn't significantly affected though.

~~~
catshirt
a million pageviews isn't cool. you know what's cool? a _billion_ pageviews

edit: can't help but presume my intention was lost on the downvoters. not all
jokes are purposeless.

~~~
AgentConundrum
reddit apparently did a billion pageviews last month. I'd rather HN not turn
into reddit.

While there are still some intellectual safe havens on reddit, the majority of
the site is now dick jokes and pun threads. Not that reddit doesn't still
contribute informative comments, just that the signal-to-noise ratio has
definitely shifted over the years.

HN, by contrast, tends to be intellectual by default, with the odd tasteful
joke or pun thrown in for good measure where appropriate.

I really like this place, and I'd hate for it to become ruined by an excess of
new users.

(and yes, I know you were just making a TSN joke)

~~~
catshirt
i was actually just curious as to why a million pageviews wouldn't be worthy
of congratulations :)

though, now that we've shifted, i agree with you- but also have hope that
pageviews are not the deciding factor of community downfall!

~~~
AgentConundrum
I don't really see a way that pageviews could significantly increase without a
corresponding increase in uniques. The most obvious reason to see an increase
in uniques is to have an increase in new users.

Onboarding new users into the HN culture is relatively easy when you're
dealing with a steady but slow intake. I'll admit that I can be an ass on
reddit and my highest karma posts have mostly been stupid jokes, but I take
things serious on HN because HN presents itself as a serious place.

When you get a significant stream of new users, it can be harder to keep them
all in line. If you get a bunch of new folks together voting up their own
brand of inane crap, it'll start to pollute the front page. A polluted front
page sets a bad tone for newer users, because they think that sort of thing is
tolerated.

HN has systems in place to stop this of course, like the ability of some users
to kill a post outright and the karmic threshold for downvoting, but there
will likely come a time when that isn't enough anymore.

I agree that pageviews are generally a good thing, but HN isn't advertising-
funded in the traditional sense (by that I only mean that HN does serve as an
advertising platform for YC companies to an extent) so having high pageviews
probably isn't high on PG's goals list. HN is pretty unique in that respect,
and that's a distinct part of its charm.

------
axiom
Regarding the classic view, isn't there a bit of bias there? since people
mostly only look at the front page, then the stories they vote up are chosen
from ones already on the front page. So comparing what the front page would
look like if only votes from old accounts counted doesn't say much since in
all likelihood you'd see the same stories.

Maybe a better metric would be to track only the first few votes that stories
get to see if the same ones would make it to the front page?

------
acconrad
What I never understand about the "more exposure will dilute our membership
quality" is that it's a social voting site. If you're going to share something
with a community that has open registration, and gets exposure by sharing
links to other networks (such as Digg and Reddit), this sort of thing is
inevitable. I'm glad it's received the exposure it has because it's become
such a great content generator. I don't really see the harm in this growth.

~~~
qeorge
More voters means closer to average. It has to.

Quirky communities with strong personalities are more interesting.

(I'm still quite happy with HN though :)

------
someperson
PG, I think you should write the year when you write a "news news" post.

This site has been around for long enough that certain older posts on that
page have some ambiguity.

------
da5e
" the stories on the frontpage are not much different from those we'd have had
in the first year."

This is the real story. I noticed that about 4 months ago the nature of Hacker
News seemed to veer out of its original emphasis and now it's back to what it
used to be.

------
js4all
> 1 million page views on weekdays

That's impressive. Congrats.

So why is it still PR6 ? I guess the 136 Errors and 6 warning(s) from the HTML
Validator give a big penalty.

------
rudiger
What are your plans for monetization? Advertising to such a targeted audience
could be very lucrative, and I'm sure lots of startups would be interested in
advertising here! Currently, all we have is "organic" advertisement through
interesting submissions and comments. What kind of revenue could one expect
from 90K unique visitors and 1M page views on weekdays with an audience like
HN's?

~~~
antirez
HN is an advertising site in some way, both for YC startups and even for all
its users that have something good to propose. For instance Redis started to
get some user base thanks to HN.

------
dpcan
I have just one thing to say:

Please do not change the site.

Sincerely.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What, not even removing the superfluous font tags?

~~~
pg
Our research indicates most users read the site as rendered by a browser,
rather than by reading the html source.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Whilst your response is amusing it just strikes me as so opposite the ethos of
the site as to be simultaneously depressing.

Like having a car that leaks oil all around the engine compartment and have
the manufacturer explain that this is fine as most passengers don't look in
there. Then finding that a gasket alteration could fix it but the manufacturer
isn't bothered because, well what's a bit of oil [bandwidth] and mess [sloppy
markup] when the car still runs.

I don't know the system that the site runs on but assuming that the
presentation layer is abstracted from the base logic it should be easy to fix
at least some basics (doctype, font tags, gzip, etags, expire headers) even if
one didn't go the whole hog and rip out the tables.

I'm not at all suggesting to alter the visual appearance incidentally I like
the minimalist design.

~~~
pg
A more accurate comparison would be using a compiler rather than writing
machine language code by hand.

When computers first appeared, everyone wrote code in machine language. People
thought that's what programs _were_. When the first compilers appeared, I'm
sure a lot of people were grossed out by how ugly and inefficient their output
was compared to the hand-written machine language code they were used to. But
people who thought that were solving the wrong problem. What matters is how
the code looks to the programmer writing it, not how it looks to the machine
executing it.

People who think HTML should be elegant are making the same mistake. HTML is
object code. What matters is the representation the programmer sees, which in
this case is the source of HN, which is quite concise.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Your analogy appears to break down, and forgive me if my analysis is poor,
when one considers the bandwidth.

Concerning oneself with HTML is different to fussing over optimising assembler
in a regular computer because the mark-up is being pushed along many pipelines
which are handling other data traffic, limiting the speed of data transfer
limits processes involved in the presentation of the page.

I guess it's like optimising machine code to be run on a massively parallel
computer in which real-time operation is desired.

In your analogy the compiler isn't [generally] producing the same assembly as
if the code were hand-optimised. Clearly there's a play-off but if you could
cut your transport across a data bus significantly with a couple of cheap and
simple optimisations (either direct to the compiler or to it's output) then
it's quite likely that you would, isn't it?

The main thing for me anyway was the surprise of finding this here. To add to
my other poor analogy it's like going round to dinner at a famous chef's house
and finding that they ordered the food in and just reheated it; just not what
you expect. Sure you get a hot meal at the end of it, sure it might be nice,
it's just you expected more.

------
maeon3
When HN goes to 10 million page views, HN will no longer be HN. It will be
another digg.

~~~
coderdude
I don't know why people are down-voting you. Some people might not like it,
but you simply cannot maintain the quality this site has enjoyed over the past
several years as we continue to take on a mess of new users. Most of the new
users simply don't fall into the hacker/entrepreneur category (as past polls
have clearly indicated). They're just people coming from Reddit or wherever
who want a "better" experience. Most of the articles on the 'newest' page are
about crap like WebOS and #superbowl and politics and you name it. HN will _in
fact_ go the way of all previous communities as it takes on hoards of people
who don't care about the original intent of this site.

~~~
antirez
I think that PG will be able to take the quality as high as today, for a very
simple reason, he does not reason in terms of pageviews for this site, and
will be willing to do all the needed changes, even if this will upset the
"wrong" part of the user base, to take quality high. So at max the new rules
will have the effect of reducing again the user base to the original one.
Otherwise if this does not happen, there will be a next HN site somewhere and
we'll switch again. slashdot -> programming.reddit.com -> HN -> ?

~~~
coderdude
I don't think there is anything he can do to prevent what some users consider
the decline of HN. He's just not that heavy-handed. He could easily go in a
kill every shit article day in and day out, but it's not in his interest to do
so. As HN is a vehicle for exposure of YC startups the continued increase of
users on HN is only to his benefit. That isn't to say that this is why he
started the site, but it's certainly a huge benefit to him. You simply don't
#1 every piece of YC startup news on Reddit. :)

I agree with you that eventually something else will come out and we will
flock there to get away from HN once it gets to the point where it's mostly
fluff articles about Apple and politics.

~~~
antirez
Yes it makes sense that even in the case of a not real 'startup' as HN it
still is too valuable to perform drastic actions. Thanks for sharing your
point of view.

------
marknutter
The beginning of the end.

------
macov
Aren't we supposed to work hard, LOL?

