Show HN: Automated post to HN at the perfect time

hnbuffer.com

15 points·heynk··5 comments

I built this because http://hnpickup.appspot.com/ is broken and I loved the original idea from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251877. Let me know what you think!

It would be interesting to correlate this to number of views it is likely to get. Hitting the first page at 3am is not nearly as valuable as hitting the first page at prime time despite it being easier to get there.

I'm curious, why did you choose to submit this at a suboptimal time (according to your own service)?

It hit 59 at 4:02, and this post had a minimum of 50. I suppose you could regard it as a bad time based on the ratings before and after that time, but this was only designed to post as soon as a threshold is reached.

1. Consider rounding to a whole number rather than allowing a 15+ decimal (example I see right now: round to 17 instead of 17.0394036208733)

2. Consider an acceptable range and a max queue time.

Example:

Post when hits 60 points or 30 points after 4 hours. This ensures it gets posted while the content is still fresh by allowing you to set a less aggressive low end for when you hit a specified wait time.

3. Would be interesting to see average (or mean?) for a given day and time slot as a base value to compare to current.

4. Consider the free users to schedule a post at a higher point threshold (> 30) for a set one time fee, but only payable if the post actually makes it to the homepage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com