Many fewer people in North America were awake and on HN two hours ago. Timing is key.

I wonder what the optimal time is to post to HN. Do people usually wake up, check HN and then go about their day? If so, around 9-10:30AM EST? Or maybe if most HNers come from the west coast, would it be 9 - 10:30AM PST?

Once you hit the front page, the time is quite relevant. But before then.. /newest is so poorly visited and read that you're really throwing yourself into the hands of lady luck and hoping there are more than a handful of people who even see your item. (Yep, tons of good stuff doesn't get voted up at all simply because no-one sees it.)

Yes, but, competition is fiercer. The beginning of a business day in the US is also the time when a lot of strong, interesting articles (from newspapers, blogs, etc) are being read by awakening HN'ers and then submitted. They can crowd out your post. But if you succeed, you'll enjoy strong inertia for a long time as people keep coming back when they should be working. Like right now :)

[I think; subjective analysis etc etc]

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991859

>"the optimal time is to post to HN."

When you have good content and your luck is at its maximum.

Luck is something that happens to people who seek it out. I get better results when I post at the times all these analytical tools say is best.

I've been chatting on HN and posting links for a year or two now, but I still haven't figured out what I gain by a higher karma. Sure, it's a tiny treat to see your link get popular or your number get a bit higher. But am I missing something?

It's not about karma. It's about making sure things I think are worth seeing are seen.

That makes sense.

That I didn't think about that way immediately probably says that you have a much closer relationship with the HN readership than I do. :-)

they didn't include HN in their writeup, but the bitly folks had a blog post about this topic pretty recently. They looked at posting times for Twitter, FB, and Tumblr. http://blog.bitly.com/post/22663850994/time-is-on-your-side

Look here for good times to post: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

Hope this helps. :)

Can someone explain this graph to me? In particular, I don't understand what the blue line signifies.

You get the explanation by clicking the question mark in the top-right corner. For convenience:

-

Some good stories posted on Hacker News are upvoted while some are not. Is it always the story or is the time when it's posted? The graph should tell. It follows these definitions:

- Newest stories top average score - is an average of six most voted stories on the HN newest page; indirectly, it measures the number of competing stories or the number of story submitters.

- News stories bottom average score - is an average of six least voted stories on the HN front page; indirectly, it measures the number of fresh stories or the number of story upvoters.

- Pickup ratio - is equal to Newest stories top average score divided by News stories bottom average score; indirectly, it measures what is your chance of getting from newest to the front page; you want a lot of upvoters to be upvoting and very few submitters to be submitting.

- Now it's ... time - gives four recommendations whether now is good time to submit or not. There are four possible values mapped to top four pickup ratio quantiles: very good, good, so-so, and bad.

This small web application is an amalgam of ETL, data mining, and visualization processes with focus on time series analysis. Data from other websites is gathered, enhanced, and presented as decision support tool. Source code is available at GitHub.

Is that yours? It's quite nice, but the spelling and grammar is off.

("Averge" instead of Average, "now it's bad time" instead of now it's a bad time)

Sorry to nitpick but that was what inmediately jumped at me.

Nope it's not mine! :)

Sweet, could you add the option to change the timezone though please? (Maybe even detect mine? :D)

I'd love to but it's not mine! :) Just something useful I found, possibly in a HN comment somewhere? I can't remember!

Both interesting and useful.

Related: An analysis of how long do items survive on the "New" page

HN link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547

Source: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/HackerNewsItemLifetime.ht...

I just went to finance.google.com myself and then thought it would be interesting to HN users and posted it right away. And to be honest I didn't check the "new" queue for already submitted links.

Regarding the accidental split test I think the "NASDAQ:FB" title is somehow more appealing.

I didn't mean to sound like I had a problem with it. The situation kicked off an interesting thread where I learned about a new and interesting site. If I had a problem, it would have vanished by now. :)

I think I missed a couple of smileys in my comment, I just wanted to share my posting process because I liked the split test bit :)

HN needs little intent buttons for comments.

Of course then we'd end up with flame threads where people say things like "we need a 'being an obtuse jerk' button for the OP."