Hacker News Reader

it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?

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Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.

It's not entirely accurate because of this. HNSearch API allows you to list users ordered by karma. According to that, I'm ~120. According to this site, I'm 94. Heh.

ah good to know. in that case 11k are the total active users in last 2 weeks. so going forward would your service retain data from 25 Jan onwards or only for the past 2weeks.

I'd think that if it retains data from 25th within a few months it would be able to show a very good estimate of total active users

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