4 Years of HN Traffic | Hacker News Reader

4 Years of HN Traffic

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Somewhat tangentially related: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...

My own numbers from just a few months of sampling

What the heck: here it is on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3670178

I am curious to know what that huge spike in Dec was.

SOPA + Reddit blackout I think?

The SOPA blackout was on January 18, more than a month after the traffic spike.

MSM links create traffic spikes. There is a (somewhat small) spike in August that pg attributed to a PC World article. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865985 and the article here http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...

Perhaps the Dec spike is from the Inquirer article which links to HN. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2130668/facebook-pr...

So from pg's profile it seem like HN has been around for almost 5.5 years. I haven't been around HN for that long, but was HN initially private and 4 years ago gave access to public? Would be interested to know.

No, it was public from the start - the ID's are sequential, so you can go back and see what the first submissions were.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={a rather smallish number}

And still using one server? One thing I learned from PG is to first look at your code before upgrading the hardware.

I asked pg in Oct 2011:

"One server. An Intel Xeon E5450 with 12 GB RAM." [1]

That's pretty damn impressive.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3079442

any chance of releasing the data behind the two graphs? i'd love to see these on a log scale or with percent growth.

Interesting weekly patterns.

I'd also be curious to match up the spikes of traffic with significant news (01/2012 3rd week, 12/2011 2nd week, etc).

Thanks for sharing!

Using http://hhn.domador.net to look at previous pages I would guess that.

3rd week of Jan 2012 ( http://hhn.domador.net/2012/01/18/23/ ) was all the SOPA/PIPA news.

2nd week of Dec was less obvious. I am guessing a major site linked to HN but scanning through the stories I am not sure exactly which one it would be for.

Thanks for the data! Playing with OCR engines lately has gotten me into the habit of wanting to turn static bitmaps into searchable and transformable data. I haven't taken a crack at graphs yet but it looks like things like http://plotdigitizer.sourceforge.net/ might be up for it.

Thanks for posting! Nothing like steady, consistent growth.

It would be interesting to overlay prominent events (e.g. the passing of Steve Jobs and so forth) on this to see if/how the spikes correspond.

Looking at the graphs, HN really isn't a weekend platform.

We shouldn't submit new entries on week-end or at end december. But this would amplify the oscillations.

I seem to recall there used to be a 'Mixpanel' logo at the footer of the page. Is HN still using them, & is that where these graphs came from?

These graphs look like matplotlib charts. I'm assuming pg just dumped the numbers and wrote a 5 line python script to make the chart.

Thrilled to know, this world has 150K hackers

I'd rather say it's far less than that. Remember that single reader can access hn via multiple devices and access points, so unique IP count doesn't really feel representative.

Yes, good point - I'm guessing many people would access HN from both home and work, to name just one scenario.

You do realise it's 1.5 million on the Y axis!?

That's page views, not users. ;-)

i'm pretty sure that's the most linear and predictable traffic graph i've ever seen.

You predicted the steady growth of HN?

Would be cool to see this graph with a column chart.

Can WA parse this image into a function of time?

Where's the hockey stick ?

Strange, I coincidentally dreamt about pg having posted stats today. I didn't bother to look assuming he would never do that.

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