Thanks, your post is much more informative. :) I was writing mine from more of a story-telling perspective, but I'll be following up with a harder post-mortem.

FWIW I estimated visitor count mostly based on a requests per second metric I had handy from GAE console. Also sanity checked against other similar blog posts like ours to see other people's numbers. I'd say 50K was a good lower bound. It was hard to say but I'd be surprised if it was as low as 15K-20K. In my experience Google Analytics numbers can be really deceiving. Especially when you compare them to other tracking methods, and go "huh?". Or your other tracking methods are messed up. Either way! Lies, damn lies, and statistics, as they say. HN audience probably uses ad blockers a lot more too which could potentially really skew things, unless you're doing GA stuff server-side.

I made a conscious choice to not even track visitor count, which I'll expand on...in another blog post!

Good luck with Polar!