Hacker News Reader

This essay was written 3 years ago; readership has soared tremendously since then, to the point that sometimes PG's innocuous comments on the site are spun into Techcrunch headlines.

That number is from 2008, when PG wrote the post. Today I bet its much higher, although still far below reddit. But like PG said, much better quality.

I wonder how many unique visitors per day HN is getting now. Is there any place I can find this info?

In October, there were 120,000 unique IPs/day.

As well as just search volume, Google has a surprisingly good handle on unique visitors to websites:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+news.ycomb...

Keep in mind that this was in 2008.