There was a point when we figured out how to stop spam submissions almost completely. That was probably what happened at the end of 2011. That would have been about the right time.
Sorry to hijack the thread but now that you will have more time in your hands... can we have an option to download our data from HN? I mean my submissions, saved articles, and comments. Thanks!
Which official API? And... the saved articles are not public. If you are referring to the new hn.algolia.com this is far (rate limit?) from being a data liberation initiative. Even Google and Facebook are much better.
Do situations such as this cause you to reflect further upon the role(s) of information asymmetry in systems and society? If so, I'd be curious about your thoughts in the context of one of your essays, if they were ever to come to such.
I continue to reflect upon this, for myself. But you write better and sometimes rather elucidating essays.
where time is 1-hour slots across 7 days. You also have a red heat map of
#successful_submissions(time)
where successful is > 100 points. I think what you want is a third map which is the ratio,
#successful_submissions / #submissions
which would be the empirical probability of a submission being successful, given the submission time. The raw counts don't tell you this.
(If you have a zero in the #submissions bin at some time, this will give 0/0, so you might want to put in a "Laplace correction" which is to add 1 count to each #submissions bin. There are other adjustments you can use, but this would be good enough for the purpose of the plot.)
I did a similar analysis to the one posted here and computed a similar heat map to the one you describe, but I marked a submission as successful when it went from new -> front page, not when it hit 100 points. The result is in ~middle of the post and it seems that weekends are best for chances of a story making it to the front.
As you noticed, not only do weekends offer a significantly improved chance of making it to the front page, but also: the mid-morning weekday peak seems to cause enough competition that submissions have a hard time making it.
This is in contradiction to an assertion made in the OP: "Your odds are slightly better when submitting at peak activity (weekdays at 12 PM EST / 9 AM PST)." The problem being, they did not calculate the odds.
You have to keep in mind that the biggest tech story from last year was also the biggest political story of last year. So, the numbers would be skewed towards rise in political stories, but it could be simply due to the overlap.
Umm... Maybe not? What if a post is titled "I don't like Lisp. Go Python!", and it hit the front page? How exactly do you infer the language being talked about?
The wealth distribution of HN is awful. The rich get richer, by getting closer to the front page and getting exponentially more points, for every point they get.
Basically move some new articles closer to the front page to get them more exposure in order to find the ones that are actually best. More exploration and less exploitation, and finding the optimal tradeoff between the two.
I wonder if there is a bias due to a specific type of people that are patient and interested enough to browse /newest and give stories the initial boost.
This is not statistical analysis, this is "descriptive statistics" at best. This:
> One of the infamous memes about Hacker News is programming language elitism, with favoritism for languages such as Lisp and Erlang.
> Lisp and Erlang are indeed obscure, which might discredit the meme.
is the exact opposite of analysis. If it was found that 40% of HNers were left-handed, HN would be noted as a particularly left-handed website, since the base rate in the population is a fraction of that.
With the NSA graph it's worth noting that HN posts with 'NSA' or 'Snowden' in the title are known to be down-graded by the site's ranking algorithm. Can't remember where the source for this is right now.
It would be interesting to see the distribution of Erlang posts over time - specifically, what portion of the 1,189 submissions came on Erlang Day (and its 1-2 sequels)?
