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Hey all. My partner and I scraped the entire database of HackerNews (~9m submissions and comments) and found the links that reappeared multiple times. We discou
by fluxic 11y ago
Hey all. My partner and I scraped the entire database of HackerNews (~9m submissions and comments) and found the links that reappeared multiple times. We discounted any submission with less than 10 points, and filtered out product launches and GitHub repos. The end result: a list of the 50 best blog posts/articles that have appeared on HackerNews, in descending order of submissions (the story with the most submissions had 6).
I know that HackerNews is heavily weighted towards news (and not old, timeless content), but I wanted to see if certain stories have nevertheless been "canonized" on the site. As it turns out, there are a select few (~3500) that have been resubmitted twice or more to HN. Those numbers are obviously biased against recent stories, which have not had enough time to reappear on the site.
I also compared submission domains to see who was posting the most "resubmitted" content. As it turns out, independent bloggers like PG and Matt Might outperform mass media outlets like TechCrunch and Bloomberg in the number of stories that have been submitted 2+ times to HN.
While the data analysis isn't perfect (we didn't account for subdomain usage [bits.blogs.nytimes.com vs nytimes.com], and if URLs had weird parameters appended to the end, we didn't count them as duplicates). Nevertheless, some really cool insights from a week's worth of work.
As a bonus, the stories that made our list are absolutely incredible. Definitely check them out.
- sdiq 11y agoVery informative pieces for those like me who missed most of the submissions in the first place. Great work!