I looked at the data from 1.3 million Hacker News stories and found that <i>when</i> a story gets submitted makes a <i>big</i> difference (up to 172%). This article shows the analysis and results.<p>I used the official Hacker News API to get the stories using Python, and used R and ggplot2 to do the exploratory data analysis and plots.
I would love to see a meta-analysis of the 'when to post on HN' articles to see if a) there's consistency, and b) if the stories themselves have skewed subsequent conclusions (i.e.: will everyone now post at 7:45 on Sunday morning?)