Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahlove | Hacker News Reader

Does any state (short of maybe California, I suppose) make it on the front page of HN as much as Colorado?

Well, we're a very polarized red/blue state, a tech hub, and the source of most of the water for the entire southwest.

Colorado has not been a purple state in 8+ years and is going more solid blue by the year. In the 2022 election, there was one thought to be close statewide election. It was a blowout, 55.9% dem, 41.3% GOP. The 2020 presidential election had very similar results.

https://www.politico.com/2022-election/results/colorado/

Aggregate stats are nice when it comes to presidential, but we still have a bunch of reps like Boebert who cause havoc in DC.

Sure, but every US state has such a local split. It’s relative to the proportion and size of dense urban areas, and has been at least since the early aughts. But every “coastal liberal” state (or whatever the “blue state” signifier is) swings sharply conservative as you trek out to less populated areas, with very rare exception. And every “red state” has at least a small island that deviates leftish, even Wyoming.

Clearly you haven't been to Colorado Springs, the second largest city in Colorado

I haven’t, but a few searches seem to reinforce my point. What am I missing from afar?

Think of Denver (700k) vs. Colorado Springs(450k) like SF(800k) vs. Oakland (450k) but unlike Oakland which is __roughly__ an extension of SF politics, CO Springs is deeply conservative to Denver's deep liberalism. CO Springs is home to the Air Force Academy and a number of military installations which underlies its politics. Its a "dense urban area" whose politics happens to be conservative. The skew left or right in Colorado typically comes from voter turn out in other areas of the state, e.g. Arapahoe, Jefferson, Boulder, Douglas and the swing of independent voters which makes up 45% of the electorate.

There are cities which run conservative. Bakersfield comes to mind in California, also roughly the size of CS, at 403k population.

The urban/rural alignment of liberal v. conservative politics is a good general rule of thumb. There are always exceptions.

But even (or especially) in deeply-conservative states, cities tend to be far more liberal. Salt Lake City (Utah), Austin (Texas), and Atlanta (Georgia) are particularly strong examples.

Aggregate stats give a clearer picture of statewide politics though. Boebert wasn't elected by the whole state, only the 3rd district.

And we have two Democratic senators now. That's perhaps the best indicator that Colorado is hardly polarized.

Colorado used to be very polarized, but that's not so true anymore. It leans pretty strongly blue now:

> Biden won Colorado with over 55% of the vote, and by a victory margin of 13.50%, an 8.6 percentage point improvement on Clinton's victory in the state four years prior, the strongest Democratic performance since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and the first time that it voted for a presidential candidate of either major party by a double-digit percentage since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

> In this election, Colorado weighed in as 9.1% more Democratic than the nation as a whole. The results established Colorado as a Democratic stronghold, rather than the Democratic-leaning battleground state it had been for the past three election cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

Good lord. Not voting for trump doesn't make us "blue".

It helps that the Colorado Republican party is about as ineffective of a political group as I've ever seen. If they were even moderately competent Boebert's district, Colorado Springs, and to a lesser extent the new district (Caraveo's) would be much redder than they voted the past cycle.

The national political lens is probably the absolutely least informative way to understand Colorado politics. CO politics isn't just a miniature version of the national debate. Our governor is a libertarian in all but name. 96% of the bills in the legislature were bipartisan sponsored last year. 45% of the state is unaffiliated with a party and in 2022, the majority of them voted in the republican primary over the democratic one. The rest of the electorate is split down the middle D and R.

So, I just manually checked via Algolia for total story mentions for all time as of this writing. Keep in mind that this is not front-page mentions necessarily, though it might be possible to crawl the "past" links to get those: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front>.

Maine (22,890) and Iowa (19,353) both beat out Colorado and California. Why the Maine love I've absolutely no idea.

"Washington" appears 22,246 times, though that's massively confounded by appearances of "Washington Post" (18,634). Adding "state" as a qualifier (e.g., "state of..." or "... state") reduces that to 461 instances. "Seattle" alone appears nearly 5,000 times which would be 9th overall (sorry, Florida). "Redmond" gives another 892 occurrences.

Colorado is actually 11th most frequently occurring state name.

If you include cities and toponyms from within California (SF, SJ, Los Angeles, SD, SV, Hollywood, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Stanford, etc.), there are well north of 30k mentions of the state or regions within it.

10 most mentioned: ME (22,890), IA (19,353), CA (10,839), NY (9,009, including NYC matches as they're within the state), IN (6,151), TX (5,603), OH (5,085), FL (2,556), VA (2,369, excluding WV).

10 least mentioned: SD (93), RI (98), NH (136), ND (150), NE (159), WV (161), SC (178), WY (209), NM (213), VT (229).

Data (with additional cities/regions or confounding searches listed for some cases):

Alabama: 372

Alaska: 1,127

Arizona: 914

Arkansas: 264

California: 10,839 (Cities/regions: San Francisco: 7,221, San Jose: 493, Los Angeles: 1,540, San Diego: 732, Sacramento: 187, Silicon Valley: 13,782, Hollywood: 3,050, Palo Alto: 833, Menlo Park: 120, Redwood City: 33, Santa Clara: 199, Santa Cruz: 96)

Connecticut: 1,369

Colorado: 1,633

Delaware: 612

Florida: 2,556

Georgia: 1,350

Hawaii: 883

Idaho: 274

Illinois: 789 (Chicago: 3,634)

Indiana: 6,151

Iowa: 19,353

Kansas: 573

Kentucky: 301

Louisiana: 294

Maine: 22,890

Maryland: 921

Massachusetts: 620

Michigan: 1,456

Minnesota: 530

Missouri: 314

Mississippi: 248

Montana: 486

Nebraska: 159

Nevada: 580 (Las Vegas: 582, Reno: 84)

New Hampshire: 136

New Jersey: 491

New Mexico: 213 (Albequerque: 48, Los Alamos: 89)

New York: 9,009 (New York City: 1,905, Manhattan: 2,355, Wall Street: 2,934)

North Carolina: 368

North Dakota: 150

Ohio: 5,085

Oklahoma: 277

Oregon: 911

Pennsylvania: 358

Rhode Island: 98

South Carolina: 178

South Dakota: 93

Tennessee: 287

Texas: 5,603

Utah: 1,005

Vermont: 229

Virginia: 2,530 (less West Virginia: 161)

Washington: 22,246 (though many confounding matches: Washington Post: 18,634, Washington + state: 461, Washington DC: 369, Washington D.C.: 112. Seattle: 4,958, Redmond: 892.) Actual is closer to 461.

West Virginia: 161

Wisconsin: 387

Wyoming: 209

For anyone still watching, the crawl's just completed. I'm processing stats now.

Currently looking at:

- Most mentioned states (may add territories).

- Most mentioned cities (330 or so largest US for now, may add selected global cities). .

- Most mentioned countries / country identifiers, including EU.

Also looking at submitters, submitted sites, associated votes and comments, and trends over time, though those may take a bit longer to complete.

Considering companies and universities as well.

Analysis is largely awk, grep, sort, uniq --- standard shell tool stuff. Amazingly powerful though really. Crawl via wget which performed wonderfully as usual. Thanks to HN/YC for not throttling too aggressively.

And, after looking again at HN's API and determining that front pages aren't represented in it ... I'm crawling the 5,939 front pages from 20 Feb 2006 to 25 May 2023 and scraping those to find mentions of states on the actual front pages.

Aggressive crawls result in 403 after a few fetches, so my current attempt has an apparently-adequate delay parameter set. It'll take a day or two for the crawl to complete. Presently up through 22 Sept 2007.

State-name matches (with some false positives) in that set:

  Delaware corporate franchise tax is due today (March 1st)  (March 1, 2007)
  An Early Stage Entrepreneur's Guide to New York City  (March 5, 2007)
  Web 2.0 Expo 2007, April 15-18, 2007, San Francisco, California  (March 10, 2007)
  Zillow Becomes Illegal in Arizona  (April 16, 2007)
  New York Times on the social news uproar  (May 3, 2007)
  What Silicon Valley Could Learn from Columbus, Ohio  (May 22, 2007)
  New York Times Will Lower Editorial Standards Online And Reduce Size Of Print Newspaper  (May 26, 2007)
  eHarmony sued in California for excluding gays  (June 1, 2007)
  New York Times versus Digg  (June 6, 2007)
  A Patent Lie - New York Times  (June 9, 2007)
  Interactive Colorado Nightlife Guide - "Social Nightworking"  (June 16, 2007)
  In the state of Hawaii, tax breaks make tech investments nearly risk-free?  (June 27, 2007)
  Top Web Apps in Arizona  (June 28, 2007)
  Millionaires Cash Out Of California  (July 16, 2007)
  C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success - New York Times  (July 21, 2007)
  Pics of Web Company HQs in California - Digg, Facebook, OpenDNS..  (July 25, 2007)
  Hackers find serious problems in California voting machines  (July 30, 2007)
  A Mystery Solved: "Fake Steve" Blogger Comes Clean - New York Times  (Aug 5, 2007)
  Colorado Startup Scene  (Aug 5, 2007)
  New York Times Sees Sense: Paywall Comes Crashing Down  (Aug 7, 2007)
  Parsing Miss South Carolina's Statement  (Sept 1, 2007)
  Texas Startup Says It Has Batteries Beat  (Sept 5, 2007)
  Spider-like vessel hits New York waters - can cross the Atlantic on one load of diesel fuel  (Sept 8, 2007)
  New York Times Launches Facebook App  (Sept 12, 2007)
  Theory Girl by the University of Washington CSE Band [mp3]  (Sept 15, 2007)

Note that seven of the "New York" mentions are for "The New York Times".

In the event anyone wants to suggest analyses to perform, I'm game.

For now, I'm parsing out title, points, comments, submitter, and the submission site.

I'm classifying by state and city (list of 330 largest cities in the US by population), as well as a few "false positive" categories (e.g., "Washington Post", "New York Times").

One interesting angle I'm looking at is the average votes and comments by site within the data --- I'd been curious for a while as to which domains seem to be most highly considered (or at least successful in garnering votes and comments). I'm still waiting for the full archive to get pulled in, but early results are ... interesting. I'll leave it there. (Paulgraham.com rather predictably does well, though it's not the highest-rated.)

I'm also thinking of ways to do trending over time. In early data (I'm up to late 2011 / early 2012 as I'm writing this), sites including Quora and even jwz.com appear and ... do well. plus.google.com hasn't yet appeared, and a few others that come to mind don't seem represented yet. Top sites by year or over a five-year interval seems potentially illuminating.

Oh, and as far as states go, when restricted to front-page submissions only, California does far better than the Algolia search results (all non-dead/killed submissions) indicate.

Dates covered: 2007-2-20 -- 2023-5-25

Total stories: 178,072 (Should match 5,939 days * 30 stories, seems to come a bit short with 98 fewer stories than expected.)

- States mentioned: 50 (mentions: 1,344)

- Cities mentioned: 109 (checked against list of 330 largest US cities, plus a few additions of my own).

- Sites submitted: 52,687

Top 20 states by raw string-match (this is adjusted below for some overstatements):

   1.  new york:         316
   2.  california:       308
   3.  texas:             98
   4.  washington:        73
   5.  colorado:          38
   6.  florida:           38
   7.  arizona:           28
   8.  georgia:           24
   9.  utah:              24
  10.  kansas:            23
  11.  virginia:          23
  12.  oregon:            22
  13.  michigan:          19
  14.  minnesota:         16
  15.  north carolina:    16
  16.  ohio:              16
  17.  alaska:            15
  18.  indiana:           15
  19.  hawaii:            14
  20.  maine:             14

Confounding factors include other terminology, other name matches:

"New York" frequently appears in reference to newspapers or cities:

  new york times:            98
  new york city:             55

So adjusted NY score: 163

"Washington" is even harder to disambiguate, as it may refer to the state, city (DC), as a topnym for the US / US Government, etc., It's challenging to identify these textually, though the newspaper and monument mentions can be identified:

  washington post:           16
  washington times:           1
  washington monument:        1

Adjusted WA score: 55. And is probably lower.

California is often mentioned by toponym (e.g., "silicon valley", region (bay area), or specific cities (SF, LA, etc.). I'm NOT going to adjust for these but do note the following major occurences:

  silicon valley:           399
  bay area:                  65
  california ave:             2

There are a few other more minor examples such as "kansas city" (confounding "kansas"), "oklahoma city", and "iowa city", though those don't affect top results.

Adjusted top-5 state rankings:

  1.  california:       308
  2.  new york:         163
  3.  texas:             98
  4.  washington:        55
  5.  colorado:          38

So, answering the original question, Colorado is the fifth-most-loved front-page state.

The 10 least-represented states:

  41.  new mexico:         6
  42.  alabama:            5
  43.  idaho:              5
  44.  north dakota:       5
  45.  connecticut:        4
  46.  nebraska:           4
  47.  new hampshire:      4
  48.  rhode island:       3
  49.  south dakota:       3
  50.  south carolina:     1

Top-10 US city-name mentions (see confounding factors above):

   1. new york:         316
   2. san francisco:    192
   3. boston:           117
   4. seattle:           87
   5. hollywood:         76
   5. tempe:             69
   6. berkeley:          63
   7. chicago:           62
   8. cambridge:         50
   9. detroit:           41
  10. los angeles:       30

(This excludes the NYC burough of Manhattan, which gets 36 mentions itself, nudging out LA.)

I've also got a list of most-featured front-page sites, with the ten most frequent being: nytimes.com, techcrunch.com, arstechnica.com, bloomberg.com, wired.com, wsj.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.org, BBC (as both bbc.com and bbc.co.uk), and theguardian.com. The mean votes and comments for each are interesting, with Bloomberg topping by both average vote (255.46) and comments (178.04), from the top-10. (There are obviously sites with much higher mean scores but less frequent appearance, including singletons).

I've broken submitters by freqency, points, and comments as well, with 43,745 submitters accounting for the stories analised. The long-absent nickb tops front-page appearances at 1,322, followed by ingve (1,177) and tosh (679). I've apparently landed 60 front-page submissions averaging 329.00 points and 147.52 comments (both fairly respectable --- I'm apparently not submitting total tosh).

I'm still updating my code and checking data (and found a couple of glitches writing out the above, e.g., whatever I'd done to tabulate city mentions didn't work). Data exist presently in flatfiles, I'm thinking of dumping to sqlite for possibly easier/faster analysis.

A rough and preliminary look at countries represented in front-page titles, again with numerous issues:

   1.  US:  1350
   2.  U.S.:  1073
   3.  China:  634
   4.  Japan:  526
   5.  India:  477
   6.  UK:  288
   7.  EU:  225
   8.  Russia:  221
   9.  Germany:  165
  10.  Canada:  162
  11.  Australia:  157
  12.  Korea:  140
  13.  France:  116
  14.  Iran:  91
  15.  Dutch:  80
  16.  United States:  75
  17.  Brazil:  69
  18.  North Korea:  69
  19.  Sweden:  68
  20.  Cuba:  67
  21.  Egypt:  60
  22.  Norway:  60
  23.  USA:  59
  24.  E.U.:  54
  25.  Israel:  53
  26.  Iceland:  52
  27.  New Zealand:  47
  28.  Mexico:  45
  29.  Spain:  43
  30.  Finland:  39
  31.  Italy:  38
  32.  South Korea:  38
  33.  Switzerland:  38
  34.  Singapore:  36
  35.  Mali:  35
  36.  Chile:  33
  37.  Turkey:  33
  38.  Argentina:  27
  39.  Netherlands:  25
  40.  Syria:  25

"Cuba" often appears as "Mark Cuban", Jordan is the country most often confounded with a major celebrity and/or IT/tech personality ("Michael Jordan" and "Jordan Hubard" respectively), "Mali" is most likely to be confused with a car or AMD chipset, the United States has multiple possible references (US, U.S., USA, U.S.A., America, American), some of which are confounded (e.g., "North America"). But this provides a rough sense.

One question answered: there are in fact not 30 stories per summary, consistently.

Which occur on the following dates:

  2007-03-10:  29
  2007-03-24:  26
  2007-03-25:  25
  2007-05-19:  27
  2007-05-26:  26
  2007-05-28:  29
  2007-06-02:  19
  2007-06-16:  28
  2007-06-23:  17
  2007-06-24:  28
  2007-06-30:  20
  2007-07-01:  28
  2007-07-07:  27
  2007-07-15:  26
  2007-07-28:  27
  2014-01-06:  0

The 2014 instance was a site outage, discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015129>

Spot checks suggest the others were in fact days with fewer-than-normal stories, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-06-30>

I'd long wondered about the day-of-week effect on HN. Turns out that yes, there is one.

Looking at just 2022 (most recent full-year data:

2022:

  DoW           Stories  Points (   mean )  Comments (   mean )
  Monday        1560     481368 ( 308.57 )    288928 ( 185.21 )
  Tuesday       1560     528265 ( 338.63 )    309799 ( 198.59 )
  Wednesday     1560     506977 ( 324.99 )    310698 ( 199.17 )
  Thursday      1560     514046 ( 329.52 )    320883 ( 205.69 )
  Friday        1560     465283 ( 298.26 )    287805 ( 184.49 )
  Saturday      1590     401207 ( 252.33 )    228966 ( 144.00 )
  Sunday        1560     410879 ( 263.38 )    239186 ( 153.32 )

Tuesday and Wednesday typically see most engagement. Biggest fall-off is Saturday.

On the other hand, if you want a chance of your submission making the front page, weekends are probably a better bet. (My data don't show this, mind, as they don't show all submissions for a day, but this tends to support my hunch / general sense in my own submissions.)

It's interesting to note that Tuesday and Wednesday have generally captured the top spot, but there was a notable fall-off in Wednesday's standing in the Covid era. Not entirely unprecedented (Wed. lagged Tues. by 10 votes (points) in 2014, for example), but it catches my eye.

There's also the long-term trends in votes and comments over the years:

  Year  Stories     Points (  mean )   Comments (  mean )
  2007     9382      92264 (   9.83 )     61207 (   6.52 )
  2008    10980     294775 (  26.85 )    186339 (  16.97 )
  2009    10950     608603 (  55.58 )    303962 (  27.76 )
  2010    10950    1062763 (  97.06 )    491718 (  44.91 )
  2011    10949    1657004 ( 151.34 )    632724 (  57.79 )
  2012    10980    1829402 ( 166.61 )    778634 (  70.91 )
  2013    10950    2132819 ( 194.78 )    998387 (  91.18 )
  2014    10905    2057628 ( 188.69 )    916438 (  84.04 )
  2015    10950    2001269 ( 182.76 )    845719 (  77.23 )
  2016    10977    2521394 ( 229.70 )   1137575 ( 103.63 )
  2017    10950    2776064 ( 253.52 )   1259899 ( 115.06 )
  2018    10950    2762928 ( 252.32 )   1262654 ( 115.31 )
  2019    10950    3051011 ( 278.63 )   1447141 ( 132.16 )
  2020    10980    3338150 ( 304.02 )   1734703 ( 157.99 )
  2021    10950    3376829 ( 308.39 )   1859933 ( 169.86 )
  2022    10950    3308025 ( 302.10 )   1986265 ( 181.39 )
  2023     4350    1309865 ( 301.12 )    737425 ( 169.52 )

Principality of Sealand?

1,477 results, just edging out Michigan (see my earlier comment).

New York ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com