

Show HN: Do "How to" or "Why to" articles make it to the front page more often? - ZanderEarth32
http://tortillasinbed.tumblr.com/post/21766667619/does-hacker-news-prefer-how-or-why

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gravitronic
It would be much more interesting to see the numbers as a percentage of total
"How" and "Why" submissions that made it to the front page.

I was sad that yesterday I did a "Show HN" with a fun website I made for DJing
youtube videos and it got a single upvote
[<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890935>] - sometimes front page is just
not in the cards I guess.

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mrspeaker
Maybe 'cause it's not as good as this one I made in 2009 ;)
<http://turntubelist.com/>

Nah, but seriously - timing is everything with HN submissions - and if you
don't get a few votes in the first 10 minutes of submission, then it's down
the tubes. I find that posting early in the morning NY time (I'm not from the
US, so it's actually late afternoon for me) is the best. I don't know if
there's any data to back that up though!

~~~
gravitronic
HAH, nice website :)

Yeah I figured for a music thing, mid-afternoon eastern would be the best bet.
But the other posters are correct, you only last about 10 minutes on the "new"
page at peak times.

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haldean
This is a fantastic first project to get started with Python! If, in the
future, you make another scraper (or anything else that requires retrieving
data from the web) I'd recommend using the Requests [0] library. It's much
cleaner and easier to use than urllib, and it makes it very difficult to do
something wrong.

[0] : <http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html>

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zalew
I'd like some data on if there are more 'why' posts that actually deliver an
explanation of a comprehensively analyzed technical/business problem, compared
to that common derivative opinions ping-pong.

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carlsednaoui
Perhaps this can be attributed to a greater amount of submissions with the
word "how". As gravitronic mentioned, it would be interesting to see
everything as percentages.

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bashzor
For these numbers to make any sense at all, you need to scrape the new posts.
Now you can only tell what you measured: How many how/why stories were
submitted. By scraping the new posts and count the ones that make it to the
homepage, you can tell which HN users prefer, if HN users prefer how/why
stories versus other stories, and how many how-stories versus how many why-
stories are submitted (probably closer to how many are on the web, so you
might get an impression of that too). The current numbers are meaningless
data, not information.

Oh and you might as well track 'show HN' and 'ask HN', or just create a
wordcloud. THEN we have really useful info!

