Top Hacker News Submissions by Year: 2009–2015

For those (like me) wondering what became of that P != NP proof. It seems to have generally been discredited (though not yet retracted). Note that I&#x27;m just reporting what I found here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=458" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=458</a><p>But I don&#x27;t keep up with this area, so maybe the status of that work is more contentious than Scott Aaronson makes it appear.

Updated: I&#x27;ve added submissions from 2006-2008. Now it includes the entire HN history.<p>Also, ranking by category: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antontarasenko&#x2F;smq&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;reports&#x2F;hackernews-top-submissions-by-category.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antontarasenko&#x2F;smq&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;reports&#x2F;ha...</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sivers.org&#x2F;kimo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sivers.org&#x2F;kimo</a><p>Thank you for letting me re-read &quot;There is no speed limit&quot; by Derek Sivers.

If you enjoyed this you might also like Wayback HN, a past project of mine! You can look at top posts by year, month, and day. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waybackhn.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waybackhn.com</a>

One thing still bothers me as a techie is that the death of Steve Jobs ranked first, and Dennis Ritchie 8th, I know that Hacker News is about business as it&#x27;s about tech, but I just think that the contributions of Dennis Ritchie to our modern world compared to Steve Jobs are much bigger, I hope they both rest in peace.

&quot;Tim Cook Speaks up&quot; as #1 in 2014.<p>Slightly related I was talking to some people the other day who are still strongly against gay marriage and want the Supreme Court to go backwards.<p>I explained to them that the fantastic news is that in 15-20 years, it won&#x27;t even be called gay marriage, it&#x27;s just marriage :)<p>If they still don&#x27;t like it, we just have to wait until they die and the world will move on without them.

The 2013 &quot;NSA collecting everything you do&quot; entry claims 611 comments and 1,689 points, but the thread linked to only has 1 point and is [dead]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6133321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6133321</a>

&quot;why the lucky stiff&quot; ...gone, but not forgot.

Interesting that a lot of the top rated articles over the year have been political, not strictly (or sometimes even remotely) technical.

Outlawed by Amazon DRM ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4682392" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4682392</a> ) tells the story of someone having their Kindle remotely wiped by Amazon with no explanation. Someone in the comments claimed to work on the Kindle and said some aspects of the story should not be technically possible.<p>Was there ever any followup to this mystery?<p>Either Amazon&#x27;s explanation, or clarification of what happened on the device?<p>Some of the stories in the top make perfect sense. Other stories look a little odd in hindsight...

Something interesting is that the top score seems to have peaked in 2011 with 4339. No score since then broke 4000 and there were two that didn&#x27;t break 3000.<p>One interpretetation is that there&#x27;s a lot more posting going on and it&#x27;s hard for a single post to maintain a top spot as well as potential changes to the ranking alogrithm. Another option may be less engaged users. Maybe a mix of both.

Is Hacker News declining in terms of visits?<p>The voting seemed to peak out in 2012 &#x2F; 2013. Not just the top vote, compare all of them.

This is missing dfranke&#x27;s &quot;How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory)&quot; which was the top submission in 2009.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=639976" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=639976</a>

What&#x27;s funny is how many of them are from, about or feature something from Michael Arrington.

More info on the Hacker News BigQuery dataset: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10440502" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10440502</a>

There seems to be a trend of increasing political posts over time.

Notice any other trends while messing with the data?

Steve Jobs&#x27; death, rank 1; Dennis Ritchie&#x27;s death, rank 18? That&#x27;s a little sad.

Many of em not available.

It&#x27;s arguable if Steve Jobs should get peace

Kinda disappointing, really. &quot;Top&quot; clearly doesn&#x27;t mean best in this case.