Top Hacker News Submissions by Year: 2009–2015

This is great. It is very cool to see this link in the "way" back in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.

This is really useful. I choose random year (month..) and pick the best of these parameters. Some materials are timeless.

Thanks for doing waybackhn. I've wasted a fair bit of time on it.

You are reading too much into votes/karma :-).

It's indisputable that Steve Jobs is more of a household name than Dennis Ritchie, even among techies, it's likely that Jobs and his accomplishments are more well-known. The other thing to consider is that Ritchie lived a fairly full life, reaching the age of 70. Steve Jobs died at 56. More importantly, he died while basically at his peak...Apple had surpassed Exxon to become the world's most valuable company in 2011, and by all accounts, Jobs still had plenty of ideas and initiatives. So there's a special amount of tragedy involved with Jobs.

There are a lot of unsung engineers and scientists who were happy to keep out of the public eye. One of the things that Jobs did well was publicize himself and make his ideas and opinions known -- and undoubtedly, his attitude and drive pushed Apple to success...coincidentally, such a characteristic gets more notice...so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jobs's death hits more people.

Well, you can argue that a couple of ways. From the business side, Steve Jobs built the largest company in the world that brings together tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars to produce tech products used by hundreds of millions of people. That's no small feat.

Larry and Serge have done a similar feat with Google, for example. Hopefully, Elon is on his way with Tesla and SpaceX.

I really don't want to have a nerd fight over Steve Jobs, I just want to make the point that by being a business leader, one can have a much larger impact than by being the smartest nerd in the room.

Whether or not you agree with it - the fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs inspired many more people than Dennis Ritchie did. This comment is not meant as an affront to Ritchie, but simply as an explanation for why you should not be "bothered." Get bothered over poverty and disease, not pop culture.

I am not so sure about that. In many places you have a new wave of anti-gay sentiment, often connected to the "new right". Hungary even changed it's constitution to restrict marriage to man+woman in 2012.

I'm sad to say it, but we still have to fight.

Alabama actually has pending legislation right now that finally takes the proper approach to this whole thing.

The state will simply record marriages reported to them. A person can be married to one other person and outside of writing it down the state is no longer involved. They actually cited the state getting involved with marriage licensing a hundred years ago as due to legislative desire to prevent race mixing.

Getting out of the process entirely is the most logical way to say "Enough, there is no debate. Move on."

Probably supposed to be this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133349

In casual observation, I've found that to be the case in every submission/comment site I've read (Slashdot, Reddit, HN, etc). The submissions that seem to gather the most comments are always the ones about politics, social drama, and "real-world" news.

This is explained by political topics being a lot more accessible than technical topics. Also given technical topics require investment in them, more specific technical topics have a more limited available audience.

For example for a given topic say Scala your audience of possible commentators and upvoters you must draw from the entire population of HN readers that includes programmers, and from this subset you must draw those competent and interested in Scala.

So of course political topics will always be higher rated than technical topics.

citing http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert."

Prophetic counter-example.

Remember that the mainstream media made billions by figuring out how to match content to specific demographics. They hit as many political and emotional buttons as possible in the process. Human nature, esp the emotional brain, applies even on Hacker News.

It's affected by algorithm changes. For example, the software now downweights any story that's 18 hours or older, with the intention of flushing the front page so that the stories with largest inertia don't just sit there.

I doubt it's that users are less engaged. It appears that HN had its most active Sunday ever today in terms of unique visitors. I've been meaning to look at some graphs of number of comments over time because it feels like those have gone up lately, too. If anybody else wants to make them, the data's public...

It'd be interesting to get a median upvote count for the top 1000 stories by year...Perhaps the algorithm change most noticeably affects the very top end of the scale (e.g. by increasing gravity)...but perhaps this is less pronounced in the middle of the pack of top posts.

The other thing to consider is that no one of Steve Jobs's stature in the tech community has died since Steve Jobs. Or at least, died tragically. I hope Bill Gates (and his philanthropy) go on for many more decades, but I imagine his passing would be on notable to the tech community on the same scale as Jobs's.

Although maybe I'm completely overlooking someone who has died since Jobs, I would think the top deaths in each year would be among the top posts (e.g. Leonard Nimoy in 2015). My second most up-voted submission is Ray Bradbury's death...my top submission being a major drop in Linkedin stock price...Linkedin/MongoDB bashing is about as timeless as death :)

Apple broke it very recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274 (5771 points)

2012 and 2013 were very sad years apparently and we had to make it clear that you can't do anything to "fix" the net.

I had, but didn't publish. Any particular topics of interest?

No matter what he did or how many mistakes he made, he deserves peace. We all made mistakes, maybe his was much public since he was famous, but that was not the subject of my comment.

Please don't post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952 and marked it off-topic.

"Top" rarely means best.

That's an all-but-inevitable result of any popularity-based ranking system.