I'm wondering if anyone has noticed any trends regarding feedback and response to links/articles/questions submitted to HN. Completely selfish of course :).
I once ran a daemon that would hit the frontpage and the new page every 30 minutes over a period of two weeks to answer the exact question you are asking. There weren't any statistically significant trends. Anecdotally, submitting on Fridays is worse than submitting on Mondays.
I figure that around noon in the US is the largest traffic, so you will spend less time on the front page as more articles are submitted. But that time is more valuable because more people will see it.<p>Conversely, if you post at midnight, you will get more time, but the time will be less valuable. So in the end, I think it probably evens out to the same number of users visiting an article.<p>The trick (not that I'm a big submitter) I would guess is to post things at all hours. I imagine many people have a habbit of only cheching at a certain time. Maybe it's their lunch break, maybe just before going to bed. By posting things at all hours of the day, you can reach all of HN, rather than just the subset that visits only at certain times.
from what i've seen, the traffic on HN seems to be low enough that everything gets a pretty fair shake. things sit in the new queue long enough that no matter when you submit it is going to get seen.<p>if your submissions aren't doing well, reconsider the content, not the timing ;)