Four days in the life of HN | Hacker News Reader

Four days in the life of HN

chart.apis.google.com

88 pointspg40 comments

This is a fri through mon inclusive. The sat was actually the day of startup school.

Orange = requests/sec; black = memory used; red = % time spent in gc; blue = median msec to serve an item page; green = median msec to serve the frontpage. The last two are unnaturally spiky because I use a very narrow window (because we use the same data to to drive our Leftronic screen at YC). So the blue spikes don't represent anything that would have been observable to users.

The slowly rising gc percentage (red) is a sign of memory leaks. They used to be a lot worse before Rtm finally tracked down the main culprit this summer.

We're now getting a bit over 900k page views per day.

How many unique visitors?

We now get around 75k uniques on a weekday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1152389

Looks like we're getting close to doubling in uniques, compared to 45K 8 months ago.

This isn't very surprising. See [1]. Also of interest, HN vs Clojure vs Common Lisp [2].

1. http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news&ctab=0&ge...

2. http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2C+hacker+news%2C...

any plans for monetizing ?

HN is already monetized, albeit indirectly, through discrete and relevant references to YC products. For example the reference to Leftronic in this post.

I'm not usually one to correct grammar, but discrete and discreet mean very different things.

Oops, thanks for pointing that one out!

It's already monetizing, by getting YC amazing deal flow

HN is sort of a loss leader for ycombinator. Free advertising for all the YC comings and goings. HN is the leader in mindshare amongst those interested in startups, startup technology and startup culture and (obviously) startup news.

also job postings

The slowly rising gc percentage (red) is a sign of memory leaks.

So do you reboot regularly, or what?

I'd have to restart the server once a week or so if I didn't end up doing it more often anyway because of releases.

Does HN run on a single machine??

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105

"Conservative, I know, but we're serving 800k pages a day off one server"

I don't see yellow, but I do see an orange. Was that a typo, or is my monitor seriously mis-calibrated?

Oops, fixed. For some reason I think of it as yellow, but it is in fact ff7700.

Google Charts also allows you to set a legend. It really should be part of the graph.

These graphs are just to tell me if anything is going wrong with the server. They're not really intended for anyone else to see.

E.g. this is the graph at this moment: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=ls&chco=ff7700,00...

Though fierarul's comment leads to a natural question. The original comment explaining the graph is really necessary for the link to make sense. Explaining the graph in a comment seems to break the (apparent) convention of submissions being self-contained.

I thought the reason for disallowing both a URL and text in a submission was to avoid this. Though, if a submission that requires a comment is acceptable, why not allow submitting both a URL and text?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823836

There is a difference. A comment is voted up at the discretion of the users, while text associated with the url would be displayed at the top no matter what. Which would mean the first person who submitted a link could essentially make their comment upon it always be the top one, and define the discussion.

I think you're missing the point. Imagine if everyone on hn posted a link that directed people to half of the content, and put the other half in a comment. That would make for a pretty crappy trend. Note that your original comment has 25 points, so as you can see there's incentive for people to start doing this.

I think a non-vote-able comment at the top wouldn't do as much damage as you might think. Maybe, instead, make it a rule where half & halfs get filtered/blocked.

By posting the chart here, I would assume you intended for others to see it, no?

My point was that the graph wasn't originally intended for others to see. It's a behind the scenes look at HN.

Is this really that big of a problem? Really?

Added the legend in case anyone really does want it..

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=ls&chco=ff7700,00...

How much did HN grow in the last year or so?

A bit under 2x.

I really liked the flat-screen monitor up in the YC offices to track the site. I want one for my site. It seemed the site wasn't getting much traffic, but then I realized most of the users were in the room at the time.

What was the original memory leak?

It was in something I added quickly to fix a hole someone discovered. I made the mistake of memoizing the function that generated authentication keys for vote links.

I want to spend a few hours and get the Hummingbird realtime scrolling visualization implemented. See the demo at (required HTML5 browser such as Chrome/Safari).

http://demo.hummingbirdstats.com/

If only you had applications to read more often. HN would get cool stuff like this all year round :)

So either a) hackers work less on Saturdays and Sundays or b) hackers work more on things they're REALLY INTERESTED IN on Saturdays and Sundays ;)

In "The Hacker Ethic", there is an allegory used describing how hackers work that uses Sundays and Fridays as the example:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2ecd9b8 (Google Books)

http://slashdot.org/books/01/03/06/1751250.shtml (Slashdot review)

The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen ... TL;DR

I have a hard time taking this book seriously since in the preview the author while focused on Christianity and the Protestant Work Ethic says that Christ "Rises to His rest in Heaven" on a Sunday conflating the Resurrection (on a Sunday) with the Ascension (on a Thursday).

Minor quibble in the grand scheme of things, I know!

How substantially modified is Hacker News code base from news.arc in arc 3.1?

What parts have been modified / extended?

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12468

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