On Hacker News, More Than Just News About Hackers
Hacker News is the hub of information about the world of startups, tech, and innovation. But did you know that Hacker News readers also use the site to discuss social issues and recommend self-help books? When HN released its full dataset through Google’s BigQuery cloud service, writers immediately dove into the data to learn what interests HN readers.
Popily’s own Chris Albon and Jonathon Morgan did some of their own scraping before the BigQuery release to discover that submitter karma scores can impact whether a post gets to the front page of Hacker News, but with a surprise discovery: the speed at which a post gains a high score is much more relevant.
In October, David Kriesel did an analysis of popular posts on Hacker News soon after his posts about Xerox Workstations randomly changing numbers on scanned documents reached the HN front page. He found that posts in the early morning on the East Coast of the US, and posts made on weekends, were more likely to be popular. He also discovered that short titles are more likely to gain popularity than long ones, and he highlighted a few top target sites for those posts: GitHub for code, YouTube for videos, news sites like TechCrunch and New York Times, and Medium for blogging.
Ramiro Gómez extracted links to books on Amazon from the BigQuery tool to uncover the top mentioned (and presumably recommended) books on Hacker News. Top of the list was not a computer science book or an entrepreneurship book — although more than half of the posts refer to books in those categories. Instead, it‘s a short book about what it would take to fix high rent prices. In fact, the books’ subjects range from mental health to politics and psychology.
The most popular recent posts also cover a variety of subjects. According to the raw data from BigQuery, as shown by Looker, three of the top 30 posts related to social issues, four were news about Hacker News and YCombinator itself, one was about the National Security Agency, two were about Tesla Motors, and one was a simple browser game. Not surprising, though, is the subject of the highest-scoring post of all time: Steve Jobs’s passing.
Popily co-founder Chris Albon’s blog post analyzing how he spent his time in the Techstars Cloud program was popular on HN this week. Why not check it out?
And if you still haven’t tried Popily, sign up for a free trial to make interesting graphs like these without code.
