Tell HN: HN item index count is approaching 10^7 | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: HN item index count is approaching 10^7

11 pointstomkwok6 comments

As you can see, there are only a few hundred items to go when this is posted. 10^7 = 10 million = 10,000,000. The previous (numerological) milestone, item 10^6, was ~ 6 years ago. Tell us about what you think HN would be like when the counter hits 10^8.

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at 10^8 HN will have annexed galaxy number UDFj-39546284 and constructed an alternate civilization entirely out of 3D printing. All of its citizens will be given stock options at birth.

And smartphones will have evolved to display HN well. After all - it's not the site that should be responsive it is the device.

I'd love if HN could keep its strictness. The 10^6 got flagged for being of low value (it just said congratulations in the title and nothing in the body) and discussion on the 10^6+1 post is two users congratulating each other. In almost all cases I agree with burried comments (and also the downvotes I've received) and often it's one-liners, jokes, emoticons, +1/thumbs up which doesn't add any much to a discussion.

Ask Science manages it by flagging a lot. Heck, here's a discussion about farting in space and the first 100 comments are insightful. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3569v1/if_you_f...

My math is questionable, but won't that happen in about 2070? (6 years to get 10% of the way, so about 54 years for the other 90%)?

Will we even be using metal and electricity still, or will all devices be made of superconductors and use quantum entanglement for data and power?

That's linear extrapolation over 6 years, but the progression isn't linear. For example, the first million took 3220-2055 = 1165 days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000000). That's over 3 years.

At that rate, it would be 270 years+ to get to 100M.

You would do exponential average rate of change calculation over linear progression to compute an estimated date.

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