Ask HN: Is somewhere out there some HN statistics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is somewhere out there some HN statistics?

13 pointstaubek15 comments

I wonder how many people submit stories, how many comments are posted daily to HN. Is there some stats page for HN?

Here's the number of stories per day, for the last 30 days or so. These counts don't filter out dead, deleted, or anything else.

  --------------------------
  :: stories per day
  --------------------------
  [('2022-12-22', 774),
   ('2022-12-21', 1261),
   ('2022-12-20', 1306),
   ('2022-12-19', 1175),
   ('2022-12-18', 811),
   ('2022-12-17', 820),
   ('2022-12-16', 1285),
   ('2022-12-15', 1340),
   ('2022-12-14', 1221),
   ('2022-12-13', 1262),
   ('2022-12-12', 1133),
   ('2022-12-11', 851),
   ('2022-12-10', 795),
   ('2022-12-9', 1125),
   ('2022-12-8', 1250),
   ('2022-12-7', 1284),
   ('2022-12-6', 1306),
   ('2022-12-5', 1337),
   ('2022-12-4', 852),
   ('2022-12-3', 830),
   ('2022-12-2', 1245),
   ('2022-12-1', 1323),
   ('2022-11-30', 1481),
   ('2022-11-29', 1324),
   ('2022-11-28', 1348),
   ('2022-11-27', 866),
   ('2022-11-26', 764),
   ('2022-11-25', 922),
   ('2022-11-24', 1022),
   ('2022-11-23', 1177),
   ('2022-11-22', 448)]

And here's the number of comments.

  --------------------------
  :: comments per day
  --------------------------
  [('2022-12-22', 6860),
   ('2022-12-21', 12008),
   ('2022-12-20', 13784),
   ('2022-12-19', 12418),
   ('2022-12-18', 11652),
   ('2022-12-17', 10372),
   ('2022-12-16', 13487),
   ('2022-12-15', 13468),
   ('2022-12-14', 13463),
   ('2022-12-13', 14500),
   ('2022-12-12', 12176),
   ('2022-12-11', 9787),
   ('2022-12-10', 9437),
   ('2022-12-9', 11439),
   ('2022-12-8', 12157),
   ('2022-12-7', 12013),
   ('2022-12-6', 13760),
   ('2022-12-5', 12971),
   ('2022-12-4', 9748),
   ('2022-12-3', 9416),
   ('2022-12-2', 12519),
   ('2022-12-1', 13578),
   ('2022-11-30', 13375),
   ('2022-11-29', 12077),
   ('2022-11-28', 12057),
   ('2022-11-27', 9024),
   ('2022-11-26', 9285),
   ('2022-11-25', 9848),
   ('2022-11-24', 10405),
   ('2022-11-23', 11677),
   ('2022-11-22', 4477)]

Are those UTC dates? Are you using something like this

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story&nume...

  https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story&numericFilters=created_at_i>1671235200,created_at_i<1671321600

Edit: updated to use UTC

I believe so, yeah. The dates are derived from a grouping query run directly on my local copy of the hacker news data. It's synced from the official api via firebase, not the algolia api. As best I can tell, the api stores all the stamps as UTC unix time. (today is of course incomplete)

Gotcha. It doesn't look like Algolia keeps deleted comments, whereas Firebase does--it marks them deleted.

I'd love to see the stats on the "quality" of comments over time.

Quality is subjective, but I'd put some qualifiers such as:

1. Grammar and spelling 2. Length of comment 3. Relevance to previous comment and subject matter 4. Lifetime of account 5. Posts per account

Obviously these can all be gamed, but might be interesting to see potential trends, because while it's a real trope to mention it, the quality of discourse seems to be falling off a cliff.

Here is the top post from exactly 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956899

Look at high quality comments such as:

> Why is Stallman still BDFL if he hasn't contributed a meaningful amount of code in years? Let him be the spokesperson so he gets the attention he desperately needs and leave the coding standards to people who code.

>> I wish people would stop parroting that stupid lie. RMS is curently heavily involved in GNU Emacs development and has been for many years. Just check the mailing list sometime.

So I don't think that HN is getting worse, I think its just people who forget that it was bad back then as well.

In case no one post some hard number, you can try to calculate them yourself using https://github.com/HackerNews/API (If does not include [dead] comments, neither page views.)

This looks interesting. Didn't know that there was API available.

Scroll down, it's at the bottom of every page. See also https://hn.algolia.com/api

I can't believe that I've never noticed that link in the footer :)

I just saw this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110321. Nice top level overview.

This was the latest post about HN stats but there are many others

https://jessimekirk.com/blog/hn_users_links/

I hope not: people may then start optimizing for interaction specifically on HN and it will loose its appeal

I don't think that it is possible to optimize. As long as algorithm isn't published I don't think that it can be "hacked".

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