

Show HN: Analysis of how long do items survive on the "New" page - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/HackerNewsItemLifetime.html

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pmichaud
Nice work, very informative. This is an issue that I feel has the potential to
kill HN in the long run. It is steadily growing closer and closer to being
impossible to hit the front page without gaming the system.

The thing is that these submissions are coming in because there are more
people, so in theory there should be a way to balance the increased submission
rate with an increased voting rate as well.

But how?

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epochwolf
require 200 karma for submission?

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kgermino
The biggest problem with setting a minimum, particularly one that high is that
it is extremely difficult to get a lot of karma from comments alone,
especially for new users without name recognition.

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cglee
That's the point: raise the bar by forcing the new users to hang around and
get a feel for the culture before submitting. On top of that, acquiring 200
karma points on HN definitely doesn't fall into the "extremely difficult"
category.

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gommm
Yes but I think a lower amount like 50 would probably be enough or at least a
good test before trying an higher threshold..

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blahedo
Nifty, but the graphs need to be labelled better; it's not always clear what
exactly the colours mean or what is being graphed.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Agreed, I wondered about that. I was going to spend time doing that, but when
I ran it past two friends they both said that by the time the understood the
text, they didn't need the labels, and not having the labels made them spend
time trying to understand the text.

I guess it's a "Read like Math" issue. You need to read carefully to
understand, or skim and get the gist. And I've moved on to the next stage now.
I may come back to it if more people feel it's important.

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sesqu

      The chart for the weekend specifically has just a few red points, which has shifted the range. Removing them would make the range better, but that's not really worth the time.
    

What do you mean by this? Are you normalizing before coloring? If so, don't.
You said the colors were for <100, 100-200, 200< and I'm holding you to it.

As for the interpolation, I think you're sampling at least hourly, so why
didn't you just store all times at each scrape and match the >60min ones with
those?

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RiderOfGiraffes
It is normalised, but the range over which it's normalising is pretty near
constant, so you don't need to worry. What I wanted to say was that without
the isloated red points we might get to see more structure in the data,
becuase we could expand the range. I may yet do that, and make careful notes
in the text and annotations to explain it. Then again, I probably won't get
time.

Regarding the extrapolation, I hadn't thought of what you suggest, and it's a
good idea. It would be non-trivial to implement quickly - I'll see. Thanks.

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scorchin
Another great write-up!

As a side note, I missed your juggling talk at the recent HN London meetup. Is
there a video available for it?

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Anon84
Is the data available? I saw the note at the end of the post, but there
doesn't seem to be a link associated with it.

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brandnewlow
Semi-related question: So how many submissions is HN getting each day these
days?

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DupDetector
You can work that out.

Start from <http://news.ycombinator.com/newest> go to the bottom of the page
and click on "More" until one of the entries says "1 day ago", and there you
are. As I write this there have been 282 items in the past 24 hours.

That's on a Sunday, which as the charts show, is a slow day.

Also just checked - the gap from "3 days ago" to "4 days ago" is 604 items.
That's 604 items in a 24 hour period during the week.

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robryan
Pretty much means unless something is instantly interesting to people it will
fade into obscurity quickly. It's a tough balance, the main thing that gets
missed a fair bit is ask hn posts where only a small amount of the community
would be able to chime in on, if those people aren't around at the time they
will never see it.

