If you're interested in investigating timing effects: We collected a dataset last year where we took a snapshot of the newest 1500 stories on HN every minute for several months which should contain the information required. Feel free to play around with it and get in touch with us if you find something interesting!

[1] Dataset: https://osf.io/bnysw/

[2] Exploratory analyses: https://github.com/social-protocols/hacker-news-data