Tracking an Item on Hacker News

solipsys.co.uk

27 points·ColinWright··7 comments

There is a similar/simpler tool to trace the position of any submission: http://hnrankings.info/9406965/

It has less resolution (and don't measure the hits), but you don't have to configure your own HN scraper.

I use HNRankings all the time to see how things have been going, but in this case I was interested in the specific relationship between hits/min and the ranking on the front page. It's obvious that being on the front page generates more hits, but I wanted to quantify that. HNRankings just shows an item's points and ranking over time - I needed more.

The scraping is trivial - I just used grep and sed to extract the bits I was interested in.

I would guess that this also depends a lot on the item itself. Sites regularly collapse under the load from HN, and I think almost any hosting solution should be able to handle ~0.7 hits/second.

Regularly, was just browsing a cool Berlin 1945 and Berlin today website, everything was smooth until it made it to HN!

I like your findings, although I would add that the secs/hit depends a lot not just on the rank but also on the time of the observation.

8PM PST will surely have different secs/hit from 8PM CET

That's certainly true, although I think it would be a reasonable simplifying assumption to say that the time-effect would be a constant, that there would be a multiplier to apply, and that would make a correction for the time slot. We can't submit the same item in different time slots to test this, because enough people would recognise it as a duplicate so as to skew the results.

The "clickbaityness" of the title would also affect the hits/min, as would the actual subject matter.

There is also http://hnwatcher.com :)

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