Ask HN: Any HN stats analysis been done?

I was just thinking of some questions about HN discussions - things like what does the average discussion look like? How long between replies is common / polite (I seem to let the other end hang for hours)

I don't particularly care about best time to post (that's defined by me as when I am struck by something) but there are many interesting questions one could ask the corpus

(Which leads to the other question - is there a good way to get hold of the corpus?)