12 ms·

Show HN: hnlive.tk – A tool to estimate activity on HN before posting

109 points by lewisjoe 10y ago

sta11man 10y ago
Gentlemen, now it's just miserable.
freddref 10y ago
How about time of day?
- lewisjoe 10y ago
  It's cooking. I wanted to validate the project before putting in effort for more stats. Thanks :)
  - freddref 10y ago
    Well I think it's a great idea in general, so thank you! :) It is something I had been wondering about, and it's something only the hn and google people probably have access to. Wonder could you generalise it for any discussion site, could make a nice simple analytics tool if you could point it at some site and get stats. Just a thought.
danhardman 10y ago
What unit is the Y-axis measured in?
- lewisjoe 10y ago
  The fluctuation in the number of comments & upvotes of the top stories are taken as the metrics. Check [https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md](https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md) https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md](htt... for more info.
  - LaFolle 10y ago
    Correcting link: https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md
divbit 10y ago
Time to apply machine learning and maximize my up votes then
n00b101 10y ago
What time zone is the X-axis (time) shown in?
- lewisjoe 10y ago
  The time is saved as unix timestamps(milliseconds since epoch). There's no timezone conversion business on the server!
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    So browser client time? Awesome! Although SF time is probably best for days of the week.
minimaxir 10y ago
For those wondering, no, submitting at times of high traffic will not necessarily make you more likely to hit the front page/hit the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254 For submissions that do hit the front page, high activity is positively correlated to the number of pageviews the submission gets overall, though. (i.e a front page submission on Saturday will get less page views than a front page submission on Wednesdays) That post was done awhile ago and I have not looked at the data since, mostly because the algorithm has changed, and the increased manual moderator intervention had made it more difficult to apply heuristics accurately.
- maaaats 10y ago
  > For those wondering, no, submitting at times of high traffic will not necessarily make you more likely to hit the front page/hit the front page Right now (and other times /new is discussed) might be a good idea, though, as people remember to check it out.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Well, yeah. But because most people don't really check /new on a regular basis, if you're on /new when a lot of people are on it's more likely somebody will see you. But to get to front, you need at least 9 other people to see your post, and think it isn't junk. Whether or not this happens is controlled by so many variables that it's essentially random: Whether or not your post is good for HN, whether the specific audience (HN carries a few) that would like your post is on at the time, how much they like it, how many people are looking at /new, how many new posts are coming, and so on. I've gotten a few post to the front, and from personal experience I can say it's hard to know what will make it. A blog post from Andy Wingo about concurrency and programming language design? Nope. A talk from Bryan Cantrill at USENIX about how the conference system is broken, and how we can fix it? Nada. An anecdote on mobile app development? Nothing. Javascript framework? Forget it. A garbage collector, an R5RS Scheme->JS compiler, and R7RS Large Red Edition? Zip, Zero, Zilch. An excerpt from John Carmack's blog about the design of QuakeWorld, Two different Lisp implementations, and a blog post about how CHICKEN Scheme does garbage collection (it does, Cheney on the MTA by the way, which is a pretty cool hack to get cheap continuations, GC, and tail recursion at the same time)? Suddenly, HN cares. So yeah, it's pretty random. Unless you post an article about an implementation of Lisp. HN really likes Lisp.
j_s 10y ago
See also: http://hnnotify.leknarf.net http://hnnotify.leknarf.net
- lucideer 10y ago
  This would seem to indicate that times provided by that notifier are not very effective: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=leknarf.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=leknarf.net
CoryG89 10y ago
I think this would be better if you could look only at the rate of other users upvoting other new, recently submitted stories, and submit based on that, rather than overall activity.
maaaats 10y ago
A bit off-topic, but this is the first .tk domain I've seen in maybe ten years. When I was a teenager and they were giving them away for free all my friends had one, the memories.
- lewisjoe 10y ago
  It still is free. You see I'm quiet broke :p
  - gtirloni 10y ago
    That are a lot of gotchas with free .tk domains though (Google is full of stories).
    - godot 10y ago
      Do you have any examples? I registered a free .tk domain for dev purposes and it has worked fine for a while just like any domains (and I didn't have to do anything special about it), but for some reasons it suddenly became unreachable for a while from certain computers (my house, office, etc.) but stayed reachable for others (Facebook's servers, for example). It appears to have recently come back in office here. I have no clue why.
      - dylz 10y ago
        IIRC they used to be mass registered for malware repeatedly, some ISPs (comcast / twc?) have int he past dropped resolving the entire tk namespace at times. Some A/V and endpoint protection solutions also completely block ie/cf/ga/ml/etc that are 90% malware.
        godot 10y ago
        The dropped resolving thing must've been what happened with mine. I verified that this is currently still the case at home for me. At office it's fine.
  - 10y ago
halite 10y ago
This app is blocked at my work: Security risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Elevated Exposure. Sites in this category may pose a security threat to network resources or private information, and are blocked by your organization. URL: http://hnlive.tk/ http://hnlive.tk/ What are you using? --update: http://www.imcreator.tk http://www.imcreator.tk ← This loads so maybe not all .tk are blocked. I'll check with security.
- eganist 10y ago
  Guessing it's blocking the tld, which is/was known for being totally free but funded by seedy ad networks.
- lewisjoe 10y ago
  I guess it might be because of the free domain(.tk) and its bad reputation.
- mgliwka 10y ago
  Same here, .tk is not even being resolved by the dns server.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lewisjoe 10y ago
The site's under heavy traffic and is struggling for life. It's a low end digital ocean droplet and I guess it isn't powerful enough. I apologize for the inconvenience. I'll get it back running smoothly when the traffic calms down. I'd suggest bookmarking the site to visit later. Thanks :)

109 points by lewisjoe 10y ago

sta11man 10y ago

Gentlemen, now it's just miserable.

freddref 10y ago

How about time of day?

lewisjoe 10y ago
It's cooking. I wanted to validate the project before putting in effort for more stats. Thanks :)
- freddref 10y ago
  Well I think it's a great idea in general, so thank you! :) It is something I had been wondering about, and it's something only the hn and google people probably have access to. Wonder could you generalise it for any discussion site, could make a nice simple analytics tool if you could point it at some site and get stats. Just a thought.

danhardman 10y ago

What unit is the Y-axis measured in?

lewisjoe 10y ago
The fluctuation in the number of comments & upvotes of the top stories are taken as the metrics. Check [https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md](https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md) https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md](htt... for more info.
- LaFolle 10y ago
  Correcting link: https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md https://github.com/joelewis/hnlive/blob/master/notes.md

divbit 10y ago

Time to apply machine learning and maximize my up votes then

n00b101 10y ago

What time zone is the X-axis (time) shown in?

lewisjoe 10y ago
The time is saved as unix timestamps(milliseconds since epoch). There's no timezone conversion business on the server!
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  So browser client time? Awesome! Although SF time is probably best for days of the week.

minimaxir 10y ago

For those wondering, no, submitting at times of high traffic will not necessarily make you more likely to hit the front page/hit the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254 For submissions that do hit the front page, high activity is positively correlated to the number of pageviews the submission gets overall, though. (i.e a front page submission on Saturday will get less page views than a front page submission on Wednesdays) That post was done awhile ago and I have not looked at the data since, mostly because the algorithm has changed, and the increased manual moderator intervention had made it more difficult to apply heuristics accurately.

maaaats 10y ago
> For those wondering, no, submitting at times of high traffic will not necessarily make you more likely to hit the front page/hit the front page Right now (and other times /new is discussed) might be a good idea, though, as people remember to check it out.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Well, yeah. But because most people don't really check /new on a regular basis, if you're on /new when a lot of people are on it's more likely somebody will see you. But to get to front, you need at least 9 other people to see your post, and think it isn't junk. Whether or not this happens is controlled by so many variables that it's essentially random: Whether or not your post is good for HN, whether the specific audience (HN carries a few) that would like your post is on at the time, how much they like it, how many people are looking at /new, how many new posts are coming, and so on. I've gotten a few post to the front, and from personal experience I can say it's hard to know what will make it. A blog post from Andy Wingo about concurrency and programming language design? Nope. A talk from Bryan Cantrill at USENIX about how the conference system is broken, and how we can fix it? Nada. An anecdote on mobile app development? Nothing. Javascript framework? Forget it. A garbage collector, an R5RS Scheme->JS compiler, and R7RS Large Red Edition? Zip, Zero, Zilch. An excerpt from John Carmack's blog about the design of QuakeWorld, Two different Lisp implementations, and a blog post about how CHICKEN Scheme does garbage collection (it does, Cheney on the MTA by the way, which is a pretty cool hack to get cheap continuations, GC, and tail recursion at the same time)? Suddenly, HN cares. So yeah, it's pretty random. Unless you post an article about an implementation of Lisp. HN really likes Lisp.

j_s 10y ago

See also: http://hnnotify.leknarf.net http://hnnotify.leknarf.net

lucideer 10y ago
This would seem to indicate that times provided by that notifier are not very effective: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=leknarf.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=leknarf.net

CoryG89 10y ago

I think this would be better if you could look only at the rate of other users upvoting other new, recently submitted stories, and submit based on that, rather than overall activity.

maaaats 10y ago

A bit off-topic, but this is the first .tk domain I've seen in maybe ten years. When I was a teenager and they were giving them away for free all my friends had one, the memories.

lewisjoe 10y ago
It still is free. You see I'm quiet broke :p
- gtirloni 10y ago
  That are a lot of gotchas with free .tk domains though (Google is full of stories).
  - godot 10y ago
    Do you have any examples? I registered a free .tk domain for dev purposes and it has worked fine for a while just like any domains (and I didn't have to do anything special about it), but for some reasons it suddenly became unreachable for a while from certain computers (my house, office, etc.) but stayed reachable for others (Facebook's servers, for example). It appears to have recently come back in office here. I have no clue why.
    - dylz 10y ago
      IIRC they used to be mass registered for malware repeatedly, some ISPs (comcast / twc?) have int he past dropped resolving the entire tk namespace at times. Some A/V and endpoint protection solutions also completely block ie/cf/ga/ml/etc that are 90% malware.
      - godot 10y ago
        The dropped resolving thing must've been what happened with mine. I verified that this is currently still the case at home for me. At office it's fine.
- 10y ago

halite 10y ago

This app is blocked at my work: Security risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Elevated Exposure. Sites in this category may pose a security threat to network resources or private information, and are blocked by your organization. URL: http://hnlive.tk/ http://hnlive.tk/ What are you using? --update: http://www.imcreator.tk http://www.imcreator.tk ← This loads so maybe not all .tk are blocked. I'll check with security.

eganist 10y ago
Guessing it's blocking the tld, which is/was known for being totally free but funded by seedy ad networks.
lewisjoe 10y ago
I guess it might be because of the free domain(.tk) and its bad reputation.
mgliwka 10y ago
Same here, .tk is not even being resolved by the dns server.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lewisjoe 10y ago

The site's under heavy traffic and is struggling for life. It's a low end digital ocean droplet and I guess it isn't powerful enough. I apologize for the inconvenience. I'll get it back running smoothly when the traffic calms down. I'd suggest bookmarking the site to visit later. Thanks :)