Hacking Hacker News for Fun and Profit – Part 1

So this is a link to a blog post on the frontpage of HN detailing the analysis of how to get a post onto the front page of HN because "a great post can save months of organic growth and give you that much needed bump of early adopters" while at the same time saying nothing about the actual product or service they're working on, other than "we are in stealth mode but sharing some cool stuff about DevOps and Security". Seems like a missed opportunity, unless their business is figuring out when to post to HN for it to be most likely to become "viral".

TFA doesn't contain much advice for article authors. It reads more like a guide to farming karma. In which case, here is a better trick: When a decent article is posted, go and post another article from the same author/website, another article about the same topic or a competitor (release announcements trigger this pattern reliably). You can probably automate this.

Interesting data and analysis to see (who hasn't wondered if there's a "best" time to post?) though I fail to see what that would have to do with any actual product. Sure, HN can give you a ton of views, but it is a pretty particular audience.

I missed views / karma points to see if there's any correlation.

Extremely minor nitpick, but you use “EST” where I assume you just mean “Eastern”. (I know I’m fighting a losing battle on this one, but for a technical audience accuracy would seem to be important.)

Instead of sending thousands of requests through that API you can download the full official dump on Google BigQuery Datasets.