Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News

The investment fidelity of this information is likely pretty high - not necessarily with this analysis ... but investment picks from topics popular on hn (ex: tesla, bitcoin, apple, amazon[ec2]) were ahead of the market.<p>Products, services, or companies repeatedly lauded in the comment section, in my experience, are remarkably indicative of future broader trends.<p>For instance, this user, in 2010, lamented about the rampant bitcoin discussions as excessively overflowing on hn like some irritating internet meme: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1998630" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1998630</a> ... at the time of posting, bitcoins were selling for $0.06 each. Would it have been a smart idea to buy 10,000 after reading that? Probably.<p>I can imagine an arb-style subscription to the right sql queries could be packaged and resold for extremely good profit to the right people.

See also my personal HN analyses, although they are atleast a year old but the overall trends are still unchanged.<p>Analyzing submissions: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;hacking-hacker-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;hacking-hacker-news&#x2F;</a><p>Analyzing comments: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;hn-comments-about-comments&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;hn-comments-about-comments&#x2F;</a><p>More recently I made a few charts about upvote probability by time slot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9864254" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9864254</a>

Bittersweet:<p>My old Posterous blog is one of the top domains ranked by average upvotes. That says something about the time when I was a better and&#x2F;or more prolific essayist... And something about walled gardens.

&gt; As of 13th October, 2015, out of nearly 2 million Hacker News (1,959,809) submissions, merely 217 have managed to rake up over 1000 upvotes. That&#x27;s about one out of every 2000 posts.<p>Math is hard. One out of every 9031 posts.

On the graph of total posts over the days of the week, do you know what time <i>and timezone</i> are the peaks? it seems very regular, like if only one&#x2F;a few timezones where concerned. Do we have such a little posting power in Europe ... ?

Pretty interesting that the daily post volume has plateaued.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m glad the growth has been curbed. Too bad we can go back to the good ol&#x27; days.

I&#x27;ve been meaning to do a content analysis for most popular animal among HN users, based on subject in headlines. My guess is something along this order:<p>1. Cats<p>2. Honeybees<p>3. Dolphins

Interesting to see who some top usernames are. Also interesting how little I care who anyone who posts here actually is in real life. All about that post quality, gents.

grellas isn&#x27;t mentioned on here? He writes some of the highest-quality posts on HN.

&gt; With a runaway total of over 7000 posts on Hacker News, Clement Wan averages 2.24 posts a day since Hacker News took off (It&#x27;s been 3,158 days since Feb 19, 2007). Two very mysterious users appear on this list.<p>Is this submissions and comments, or just subs, or just comments?

<i>&quot;6 bootload 4212 28759 Peter Renshaw, British creative learning consultant and researcher&quot;</i><p>A quick inspection of user id would have confirmed this. Should read:<p>6 bootload 4212 28759 PR Programmer, Melbourne, Australia

I&#x27;d like to see &#x27;Erlang&#x27; on the WordTrends graph, though the plateau of story volumes may mean we can void that eternal September failsafe.

&gt; <i>To me, the most surprising entry was Kalzumeus, which I&#x27;ve never heard of.</i><p>&#x27;dd367, as you probably are aware by now, Kalzumeus is the company&#x2F;blog of &#x27;patio11.<p>Anyway, thanks for the great analysis! One thing that surprised me was the word &quot;lisp&quot; not appearing in &quot;Most Commonly Upvoted Words&quot; table.

In case anyone is interested, I broke down the posts on HN by TLD in a blog post a couple months ago: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.park.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.park.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;hacker-news-posts-by-domain-tld...</a>

I have to disagree with the most upvoted contributors in the article. The #1 on here has over 200,000 karma points. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;leaders" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;leaders</a>

Does anyone know who nickb is?

Two main themes of the top 100: Death of a respected person or shutdown of a popular company.<p>[edit: spelling]

<i>Colin Perceival</i><p>s&#x2F;ei&#x2F;i&#x2F;g

9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...