Interesting study, it suggests a few dynamics.<p>The weekday data show a high back-page rate for Tuesday, and a high frontpage rate for weekend posts (Saturday/Sunday). This suggests to me that the total <i>volume</i> of posts, a statistic not presented (that I noticed) might have some bearing. Specifically, many PR firms and other seakers of publicity tend to target Tuesday morning for positive items, as these beat the Monday rush (and blues), but allow for time to process during the rest of the week. And professional submitters are going to be quiet on weekends. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that HN attracts a significant amount of direct or indirect RP blitzing. My thought is that PR pieces are, in general, less likely to be voted to front page than organic content -- where PR includes low-quality blog, YouTube, marketing, and similar type content.<p>The time-of-day analysis suggests something similar. Traffic begins to pick up at about 0400 system time, which is US/Pacific. That would be 7am East Coast (morning breakfast/commute) and about 10am in Europe, suggesting there's traffic arriving from those locations. There's also a pretty noticeable <i>dip</i> in backs ratio around the noon hour, plus or minus, and a slight increase in the early afternoon. Again, PR / SEO content might take a mid-day break within the US.<p>As for "new" page reconfigurations, a concern I've had is that as submissions increase, the latency of any given item on the page decreases -- well under an hour at peak times. Odds of even a good item collecting upvotes is small.<p>An alternative presentation might be to randomly shard submissions such that each is present on the page for at least some period of time, <i>for some fraction of HN users</i>. A hash of UID (or some other arbitrary value) and shard assignment, weighted by the predicted voting on the item, would present <i>each</i> unvoted and low-voted submission to a small set of users, but over a longer period of time, while increased positive votes would expand the exposure category. The idea being that each piece has a more realistic opportunity for exposure. Flags would remove from scores.<p>HN does a good job of (usually) promoting quality and interesting content. It does have a high false-negative rate, in not promoting good content, which is a problem. On the other hand, <i>there are very real limits to how much content a pereson can handle in a day</i>, and simply opening the firehose wider isn't a viable solution.<p>Based on counts of daily emails from Stephen Wolfram and Walt Mossberg, and <i>The New York Times</i> moderation desk volumes, I'm seeing ~150 - 300 emails, or <800 comment moderations, per day, as something of a pertty consistent upper bound to meaningful content interaction, and that 800 is a pretty low value of "meaningful" at about 36 seconds per item. HN's front page with 30 solid articles is a pretty reasonable target for deeper material.