I commented on the blogger's post that I don't think this is really accurate. It doesn't take into account smaller volumes of submissions in the middle of the night, i.e. it looks at the absolute number of items being made popular rather than the probability of any particular link being made popular. This is not entirely clear because the aiderss ranking algorithm is opaque, but I still think its the case.
Maybe this thinking makes sense on the larger sites, but for here, it just sounds stupid.
I have often wondered how this "organism" call the Hacker News community works and have finally satisfied myself by not even thinking about it any more.
I often find what I think is the coolest article and wonder what others will think. So I submit it and it sits there with no comments or upvotes.
Did I submit it at a bad time? Or a bad day? Were all the people who would have liked it busy doing something else? What time was it in Europe? In California? In New York? Did I submit it while there was free beer and munchies at a Super Happy Dev House somewhere? Was pg speaking somewhere?
Or maybe people just don't care about the same things I do sometimes. (I suspect this is the most likely reason.) But that's cool too, because that's still a good answer.
So instead of trying to understand the unimportant and elusive, it's probably a better idea to submit what we think is interesting and see what happens. And comment when we have something to say and shut up when we don't. And vote, too. But mostly, use most of those cycles on our own startups and save hn for breaks.
It would be interesting to see stats for HN regarding that. It seems like afternoons are quite dead around here.
Then again, I'd rather that data not be public, because it only leads to people trying to game the system for more karma, and I prefer this site the way it is.
I think curiosity should be satisfied over practical security-by-obscurity of not knowing... I think it would be interesting to make a graph of news.YC score based on the time during the week that it was posted... Maybe a circular kernel distribution of sorts?
PG! Could you release your server logs? Pretty please?
since the rank of a post is votes / hours since submission if you wanted to game the system you would probably wait until the morning to post something. More eyeballs means more potential votes, which leads to being higher on the home page, which leads to more attention, etc. That's just my guess though.
Things seem to stay on the front page for more than 24 hours on Hacker News, so I doubt there's any reason to try to game the system. If your article is good, people will see it.
Once they get to the front page. There is a relatively (depending on the time of day, and no I don't have stats) smaller window when stuff scrolls down the 'new' page.
