

Item 10^6 - pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000000

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henning
Thanks for building this site, Paul.

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davi
OK, while we're on the topic of useless numerology:

How old are you in HN years? (ID of your most recent post / ID of your first
post)

me: 1000140 / 174632 = 5.7 HN years

edw519 (current leader after pg): 999538 / 9357 = 107 HNyears

RIP, nickb: 685017 / 2649 = 259 HNyears

mechanical_fish: 999416 / 22714 = 44 HNyears

~~~
colbyolson
When was it confirmed that nickb had passed?

~~~
rms
Only some trolls think Nickb is dead. The best solid evidence for him not
being dead is that even if he doesn't answer his cell phone, he seems to be
paying the bill. Though I suppose that's not very good evidence with automatic
payment being so common.

~~~
philwelch
Every so often in the news you read about some elderly person in one of the
developed countries found dead in their apartment, having been dead for
months. Their pensions keep getting direct-deposited and their bills keep
getting paid automatically so no one suspects anything for awhile.

~~~
baxter
The most extreme case I've heard of:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/81326...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8132642.stm)

This tangent is not a pleasant one, but I couldn't resist making a citation.

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kogir
I was secretly hoping pg would hack things so that 10^6 was just skipped ;)

~~~
pg
I considered it, but item ids are so deep in the code that it would have been
asking for trouble.

~~~
zachbeane
A one-line change to new-item-id is asking for trouble?

~~~
scott_s
A one-line change to something which probably has assumptions all over the
rest of the code is asking for trouble, yes.

~~~
zachbeane
I actually read the code, and that's not the case.

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steve___
At least the comment was original.

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vaksel
would have been nicer if the post was a little bit more programming related.

Since it's somewhat an anniversary, can you tell us what kind of traffic HN is
getting? users wise, pageviews wise. Or is that a trade secret?

~~~
pg
We now get around 40k unique ips and 500k pageviews on week days. Here's the
traffic as of last night:

<http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-16dec09.png>

The reason pageviews peaked in Aug is that we got better then at shutting down
over-aggressive crawlers. The big spike in uniques was when the HN thread
about _why became the de facto condolence page for the whole web.

~~~
vaksel
those numbers are pretty good, although the ratio is lower than I expected. 12
page views per user, per month? I view more than that while I eat my
breakfast.

~~~
pg
Those numbers are per day, not per month.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Now we look to the 2^20 day:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048576>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Once you start looking for "interesting" ids you can find all sorts of reasons
to find them. 2^20, the next prime, Fibonacci numbers, etc.

Perhaps for any given point in a increasing number series there is an infinite
number of interesting numbers just around the corner.

Sigh.

It's the sieve of Giraffes

~~~
ars
> It's the sieve of Giraffes

Or the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox>

Every number is interesting somehow:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number> \- and the quote: "Every
positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood,
upon hearing of the taxicab incident.

~~~
gjm11
From Littlewood's (wonderful) "Mathematician's Miscellany":

 _I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of
the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I
wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now
stands), "It was Littlewood who said ..."_

 _(What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and
with poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud. I later taxed Hardy with this
habit; on which he replied: "Well, what is one to do, is one always to be
saying 'damned good'?" To which the answer is "yes".)_

Until now I've always taken these paragraphs as saying that it _wasn't_ really
Littlewood who made the remark about Ramanujan, but on rereading it I've
changed my mind: I think the point is that he did say it, and was annoyed that
Hardy didn't credit him, and made a little joke about it which Hardy
interpreted correctly. Maybe I'm overinterpreting. Littlewood's second
paragraph doesn't quite make sense to me (i.e., what it proffers as an
explanation doesn't seem to explain very well) on either interpretation. If he
didn't say it, then (having seen that second set of proof sheets) he and Hardy
effectively conspired to credit him for something he hadn't said, which would
be quite a breach of academic etiquette...

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chaosmachine
Can you estimate how quickly 2e6 will occur at the current growth rate? I
wouldn't be surprised if it happened in 2010.

~~~
teuobk
Based on fitting a simple logarithmic curve, plus some fiddling, I'm thinking
2e6 will happen in late September, 2010.

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sama
sadly i did not have time to test my script and there was a bug or i would
have for sure had it :(

~~~
mixmax
You can take solace in the fact that you just had your 1K karma day :-)

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zachbeane
You can't use item numbers as an index of activity.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87846>

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Raphael
1000000 GET

