Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

In February, I did an analysis on all Hacker News stories: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/

Yesterday, I published an analysis on all Hacker News comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

There's a lot of interesting trends in the data. Let me know if you want to know anything in particular and I'll get back to you. :)

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It would be interesting to redo the top karma list by comment karma only. It would also be interesting to look at liberal vs conservative political sentiment over time. I feel like the site has gotten more liberal over the years, especially after all the Chelsea Manning stuff, but not sure if that is accurate.

I actually have the list of top users by comment karma: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ws2VK-UB7IQpVUZgPZ9M...

I also included the number of thread wins (user made comment with highest number of points in a given submission thread) to see if there was any unusual relationship. There wasn't: correlation is 0.89. I ended up not including it in the article because it's long enough as-is. :P

Thanks! I would have thought that I'd have been higher ranked when looking at only comments, although actually my rank is almost the same. Interesting to see that many of the other top users are using the site in more or less the same way.

Is that top overall karma users, but then sorted by comment karma, or is that actually top comment karma users?

Top comment karma users.

SQL query:

   SELECT
   author,
   SUM(num_points) AS total_comment_karma,
   MAX(created_at) AS last_comment
   FROM hn_comments
   GROUP BY author
   ORDER BY total_comment_karma DESC
   LIMIT 1000

It'd be interesting to see if including an URL in the body of a post has any effect on votes received.

I would be interested to know the average hourly cost of HN in lost productivity :)

I'd like to know the average hourly amount earned from HN. I know personally HN has helped me greatly in the projects I do at work.

Yes this is an interesting question too, but one that is much harder to answer. I love HN, but it sure gets a lot of activity during work hours :)

We seem to think that time spent learning is lost labor, rather than that time spent laboring is lost time for learning, although we know that both learning and laboring are required for productivity, and that learning is capex.

40 wpm x total words x (hmm need to look up productivity stats) - but we could do it :-)

That's some pretty impressive analysis, nice visualizations too. Thank you for doing all that hard work!

Thanks for that. Great stuff.

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