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Top Hacker News Submissions by Year: 2009–2015
- gailees 11y agoNotice any other trends while messing with the data?
- anton_tarasenko 11y agoI had, but didn't publish. Any particular topics of interest?
- brobinson 11y agoThe 2013 "NSA collecting everything you do" entry claims 611 comments and 1,689 points, but the thread linked to only has 1 point and is [dead]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133321
- nowarninglabel 11y agoProbably supposed to be this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133349
- minimaxir 11y agoMore info on the Hacker News BigQuery dataset: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502
- fnayr 11y agoInteresting that a lot of the top rated articles over the year have been political, not strictly (or sometimes even remotely) technical.
- acemarke 11y agoIn casual observation, I've found that to be the case in every submission/comment site I've read (Slashdot, Reddit, HN, etc). The submissions that seem to gather the most comments are always the ones about politics, social drama, and "real-world" news.
- ivl 11y agoJust taking a guess here: the really interesting technical submissions might just appeal to the users who are fond of that subset of tech, but the political ones have a broader interest? Or maybe it's that the technical submissions don't really cause the same emotional response (well, barring stuff like Heartbleed, or other serious issues in tech).
- acemarke 11y agoDefinitely both of those.
- hkmurakami 11y agoHowever, the site that gets the most front page links is actually github.com (a friend of mine scrapes the front page)
- levemi 11y agoThis is explained by political topics being a lot more accessible than technical topics. Also given technical topics require investment in them, more specific technical topics have a more limited available audience. For example for a given topic say Scala your audience of possible commentators and upvoters you must draw from the entire population of HN readers that includes programmers, and from this subset you must draw those competent and interested in Scala. So of course political topics will always be higher rated than technical topics.
- amsilprotag 11y agociting http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html "What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert." Prophetic counter-example.
- benbenolson 11y agoSteve Jobs' death, rank 1; Dennis Ritchie's death, rank 18? That's a little sad.
- mbesto 11y agoWhat's funny is how many of them are from, about or feature something from Michael Arrington.
- nxzero 11y ago"why the lucky stiff" ...gone, but not forgot.
- kiloreux 11y agoOne thing still bothers me as a techie is that the death of Steve Jobs ranked first, and Dennis Ritchie 8th, I know that Hacker News is about business as it's about tech, but I just think that the contributions of Dennis Ritchie to our modern world compared to Steve Jobs are much bigger, I hope they both rest in peace.
- educar 11y agoYou are reading too much into votes/karma :-).
- nxzero 11y agoOr that either of them would likely have cared what their ranking was on HN.
- danso 11y agoIt's indisputable that Steve Jobs is more of a household name than Dennis Ritchie, even among techies, it's likely that Jobs and his accomplishments are more well-known. The other thing to consider is that Ritchie lived a fairly full life, reaching the age of 70. Steve Jobs died at 56. More importantly, he died while basically at his peak...Apple had surpassed Exxon to become the world's most valuable company in 2011, and by all accounts, Jobs still had plenty of ideas and initiatives. So there's a special amount of tragedy involved with Jobs. There are a lot of unsung engineers and scientists who were happy to keep out of the public eye. One of the things that Jobs did well was publicize himself and make his ideas and opinions known -- and undoubtedly, his attitude and drive pushed Apple to success...coincidentally, such a characteristic gets more notice...so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jobs's death hits more people.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI'm a critic of Jobs, especially his legend, as much as someone respects him. Yet, your comment rings true to my ears. Good summary.
- briholt 11y agoThere seems to be a trend of increasing political posts over time.
- jimmaswell 11y agoIt's arguable if Steve Jobs should get peace
- kiloreux 11y agoNo matter what he did or how many mistakes he made, he deserves peace. We all made mistakes, maybe his was much public since he was famous, but that was not the subject of my comment.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dang 11y agoPlease don't post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952 and marked it off-topic.
- c3534l 11y agoKinda disappointing, really. "Top" clearly doesn't mean best in this case.
- nxzero 11y ago"Top" rarely means best.
- trump2016chalk 11y agoRe: the people America votes to become president
- dredmorbius 11y agoThat's an all-but-inevitable result of any popularity-based ranking system.
- alschwalm 11y agoFor those (like me) wondering what became of that P != NP proof. It seems to have generally been discredited (though not yet retracted). Note that I'm just reporting what I found here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458 But I don't keep up with this area, so maybe the status of that work is more contentious than Scott Aaronson makes it appear.
- dubin 11y agoIf you enjoyed this you might also like Wayback HN, a past project of mine! You can look at top posts by year, month, and day. http://www.waybackhn.com http://www.waybackhn.com
- anton_tarasenko 11y agoUpdated: I've added submissions from 2006-2008. Now it includes the entire HN history. Also, ranking by category: https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/hackernews-top-submissions-by-category.md https://github.com/antontarasenko/smq/blob/master/reports/ha...
- mdkras 10y agoThis is great. It is very cool to see this link in the "way" back in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.
- dangoldin 11y agoSomething interesting is that the top score seems to have peaked in 2011 with 4339. No score since then broke 4000 and there were two that didn't break 3000. One interpretetation is that there's a lot more posting going on and it's hard for a single post to maintain a top spot as well as potential changes to the ranking alogrithm. Another option may be less engaged users. Maybe a mix of both.
- dang 11y agoIt's affected by algorithm changes. For example, the software now downweights any story that's 18 hours or older, with the intention of flushing the front page so that the stories with largest inertia don't just sit there. I doubt it's that users are less engaged. It appears that HN had its most active Sunday ever today in terms of unique visitors. I've been meaning to look at some graphs of number of comments over time because it feels like those have gone up lately, too. If anybody else wants to make them, the data's public...
- dangoldin 10y agoAh interesting. I was thinking even if the algorithm didn't change the volume could have had a side effect on it. Do you expose the history of the algorithm?
- danso 11y agoIt'd be interesting to get a median upvote count for the top 1000 stories by year...Perhaps the algorithm change most noticeably affects the very top end of the scale (e.g. by increasing gravity)...but perhaps this is less pronounced in the middle of the pack of top posts. The other thing to consider is that no one of Steve Jobs's stature in the tech community has died since Steve Jobs. Or at least, died tragically. I hope Bill Gates (and his philanthropy) go on for many more decades, but I imagine his passing would be on notable to the tech community on the same scale as Jobs's. Although maybe I'm completely overlooking someone who has died since Jobs, I would think the top deaths in each year would be among the top posts (e.g. Leonard Nimoy in 2015). My second most up-voted submission is Ray Bradbury's death...my top submission being a major drop in Linkedin stock price...Linkedin/MongoDB bashing is about as timeless as death :)
- grecy 11y ago"Tim Cook Speaks up" as #1 in 2014. Slightly related I was talking to some people the other day who are still strongly against gay marriage and want the Supreme Court to go backwards. I explained to them that the fantastic news is that in 15-20 years, it won't even be called gay marriage, it's just marriage :) If they still don't like it, we just have to wait until they die and the world will move on without them.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoI am not so sure about that. In many places you have a new wave of anti-gay sentiment, often connected to the "new right". Hungary even changed it's constitution to restrict marriage to man+woman in 2012. I'm sad to say it, but we still have to fight.
- brightball 10y agoAlabama actually has pending legislation right now that finally takes the proper approach to this whole thing. The state will simply record marriages reported to them. A person can be married to one other person and outside of writing it down the state is no longer involved. They actually cited the state getting involved with marriage licensing a hundred years ago as due to legislative desire to prevent race mixing. Getting out of the process entirely is the most logical way to say "Enough, there is no debate. Move on."
- minikites 10y agoMy simplistic understanding of history is that this is how marriage was in the Western world for hundreds of years. Two people just said they agree to marry and the local church would record it. No ring, no ceremony, just two people agreeing.
- brownbat 11y agoOutlawed by Amazon DRM ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392 ) tells the story of someone having their Kindle remotely wiped by Amazon with no explanation. Someone in the comments claimed to work on the Kindle and said some aspects of the story should not be technically possible. Was there ever any followup to this mystery? Either Amazon's explanation, or clarification of what happened on the device? Some of the stories in the top make perfect sense. Other stories look a little odd in hindsight...
- alanning 11y agohttp://sivers.org/kimo http://sivers.org/kimo Thank you for letting me re-read "There is no speed limit" by Derek Sivers.
- dc2 11y agoIs Hacker News declining in terms of visits? The voting seemed to peak out in 2012 / 2013. Not just the top vote, compare all of them.
- akerro 10y ago2012 and 2013 were very sad years apparently and we had to make it clear that you can't do anything to "fix" the net.
- aslammuet 10y agoMany of em not available.
- spatulon 10y agoThis is missing dfranke's "How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory)" which was the top submission in 2009. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976