6 ms·

Results from being #1 on Hacker News for 6 hours

139 points by plondon514 5y ago

dosshell 5y ago
is the time zone in the plots CET?
- plondon514 5y ago
  EST
Normal_gaussian 5y ago
> Amazingly, AWS billing stayed very low/consistent with other non-active days The way they are showing CPU I'm guessing they are using a VPS, :. the only variable cost is probably egress, which is often incredibly cheap (compared to a non trivial server load). Or, in other words, yet another time when you don't need k8s!
ryanfoo 5y ago
Genius, being on HN twice in a week :D
reacharavindh 5y ago
If you can handle a HN surge with a low end droplet on Digital Ocean...... this ought to give some sense for the of us using Kubernetes - it is not really needed _most_of the time!
- jrockway 5y ago
  I run Kubernetes on my low-end Digital Ocean droplet.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  I don't understand why this blog post has invited non-sequiturs about Kubernetes. Autoscaling is only one small part of what Kubernetes provides.
  - tgv 5y ago
    Well, I for one have never heard anyone "evangelize" other use cases. Can you name some advantages, or point me to an article? Because I did hear about the set up difficulties...
    - toto444 5y ago
      I thought it was all about easing container deployment and orchestration (not that I know anything about it).
    - sodality2 5y ago
      resilience to dropping servers is one. (sort of hand-in-hand with auto-scaling, both imply dynamic sizing of server pool)
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    I can only guess that small sites frequently experiencing the hug of death when they get #1 on HN leads some people to believe you need some insane setup, when in reality it's more like this case: it works just fine on a smallish setup as soon as you remember to enable caching.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  it usually amazes me to see sites going down because of HN traffic because it is really not that much, in fact barely noticeable in a 10-year old server.
beznet 5y ago
If this post gets #1 I expect to see results titled "Results from being #1 on HN about being #1 on HN"
- plondon514 5y ago
  Ask and ye shall receive
mettamage 5y ago
Fascinating. I thought that HN was more like a 100K community (of monthly active users). I guess my ballpark is correct? I now think it's slightly less.
- drclau 5y ago
  You know what would be nice? HN stats! Active users (daily, monthly, etc.), how many posts a user checks on avg., how many comments per user, how many submissions per user, top commenters, top etc. etc. etc., breakdown per OS more etc. etc. etc. :) @HN, what do you think?
- Lapsa 5y ago
  I don't click on every #1 link.
- furyofantares 5y ago
  I probably click the #1 link less than 10% of the time and idunno there's only like a 1 in 3 chance I check HN when any given story is on the front page, so from their 29k views now I'm thinking HN is 1M active users. Which of us is way off?
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Some guestimating: I clicked on 3 of the current top 10 posts, so if that's a representative click-through rate then that would put the HN community at ~100k daily active users (which probably means more like 1M monthly). That's assuming the post stayed in the top 10 for 24 hours, or at least long enough for visitors from every time zone to notice it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  A 6 hour window is less than 1% of a month. If you think HN has 100K MAUs then you should expect way less than 28,000 people to hit HN during that 6 hour window to see the link in the #1 spot. Even if the article was on the front page for a full day you wouldn't expect 28,000 clicks because fewer than that would be hitting HN on that particular day. Traffic isn't distributed linearly across the month but still. Even then, I don't think this is a representative snapshot of HN users anyway. The average time on the site was 37 seconds. That's enough to work out what it's about and decide it's not interesting (to that person). As Codeamigo is a coding school, and HN has a lot of users who can already code, that's not surprising. It's likely that far more people read the comments first and didn't bother clicking after understanding what it is. More importantly than all of that though, is that the link wasn't about Codeamigo. It was about starting it after being rejected by Codacademy. The interesting part of the narrative was about coming back from rejection, not the product itself. The fact 28,000 people clicked at all is amazing.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I was #1 for a few hours a year ago, from last St. Paddy’s Day. It was a nice ego boost, but it only lasted for a day or so, and then it was back to being a regular schlub. Anyone interested in a secondhand cape? I never even got a chance to wear it.
- brightball 5y ago
  I've done it a few times, which shocked me. Each time it meant about 20-40k unique views and some solid discussion. That's honestly my favorite thing when it happens, seeing something I wrote about discussed in depth on here by people who know what they are talking about. The only real lasting benefit was a steady stream of traffic to those articles years later. Reality Driven Development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154355 Comparing Elixir and Go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497505 Docker is the Heroku Killer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371249 No Such Thing as "Real" Programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045526
cblconfederate 5y ago
i ve had posts in the frontpage in the past. It's not worth it for the community, it is negative and stuck in a groupthink. It usually contributes zero or less than that. Still, you get a lot of link juice because a lot of other sites copy the link.
- plondon514 5y ago
  It's been a pretty positive experience for Codeamigo. People have been reaching out to help out, submit bug reports, and suggest interesting features.
jeswin 5y ago
Can you post OS stats as well please, if you have them? From my own posts which made it to the front-page, I remember that non-mobile users were predominantly on Macs, with Linux far behind and Windows being tiny. I don't remember the exact numbers though; and I'd also love to hear the Android/iOS breakup.
- plondon514 5y ago
  Operating system Visitors iOS 8k (28%) Mac 7.9k (28%) Android 7.2k (26%) Windows 3.5k (13%) GNU/Linux 897 (3%) Ubuntu 376 (1%) Chrome OS 94 (0%) Fedora 68 (0%) FreeBSD 4 (0%)
  - jeswin 5y ago
    Thank you.
conradfr 5y ago
Do the raw numbers take into account adblockers?
- plondon514 5y ago
  Hmm good point (it does not). Codeamigo uses Plausible, which is blocked by adblockers.
jeffwass 5y ago
I once linked a video on my YouTube channel in a comment which was a reply to the top comment on a thread. My YouTube channel gets hardly any views, but that one day I got perhaps 100-200 hundred views. But the knock-on effect was great (although small), YT finally started recommending my video to others, and I was averaging between 1-3 views a day. It’s tapered off now to a handful of views a week.
shantnutiwari 5y ago
I reached the front page of HN too (though not #1). My rough stats were: 20-30,000 new visitors Most were from USA, with europe and India, China behind. Mobile users were 70-80% I've been on top of HN and Reddit programming before as well. Though you get a boost, the traffic isnt very sticky. From those 30,000 visitors, I got maybe 20-30 email signups. And the traffic dropped in 1-2 days. But there are long term benefits, as the link was then shared by other people on Linkedin, Chinese new sites etc, leading to indirectly new visitors over time.
tmaly 5y ago
I can't tell, is that bounce rate mentioned in the article good or bad?
leerob 5y ago
> Investigating the Vercel response headers, we can see that the X-Vercel-Cache Header is 'MISS' Lee from Vercel here. SSR + caching is extremely powerful, but it's more difficult to get right :) We're working on providing more tools to help developers understand if they're not adding the correct caching headers, but in the meantime, tools like Incremental Static Regeneration help you have a static output while still having dynamic data. It's not a perfect use case for everything, but it might be something to consider. Regardless, glad you got the caching headers correct - let me know if you have any other questions or feedback!
georgewsinger 5y ago
Possibly useful data for other startups: SimulaVR (https://www.simulavr.com https://www.simulavr.com) made the front page a few weeks ago. This led to ~2.5K new signups for our Linux VR headset waitlist.
perelin 5y ago
Interesting! I only consume HN via RSS feed. That means: chronological order + I have no idea what is #1 at any given time. Always wonder why some posts get tons of comments and others almost none at all. Micro echo chamber? Does the time of posting affect the impact? I wonder how many people have the same experience.

139 points by plondon514 5y ago

dosshell 5y ago

is the time zone in the plots CET?

plondon514 5y ago
EST

Normal_gaussian 5y ago

> Amazingly, AWS billing stayed very low/consistent with other non-active days The way they are showing CPU I'm guessing they are using a VPS, :. the only variable cost is probably egress, which is often incredibly cheap (compared to a non trivial server load). Or, in other words, yet another time when you don't need k8s!

ryanfoo 5y ago

Genius, being on HN twice in a week :D

reacharavindh 5y ago

If you can handle a HN surge with a low end droplet on Digital Ocean...... this ought to give some sense for the of us using Kubernetes - it is not really needed _most_of the time!

jrockway 5y ago
I run Kubernetes on my low-end Digital Ocean droplet.
ferdowsi 5y ago
I don't understand why this blog post has invited non-sequiturs about Kubernetes. Autoscaling is only one small part of what Kubernetes provides.
- tgv 5y ago
  Well, I for one have never heard anyone "evangelize" other use cases. Can you name some advantages, or point me to an article? Because I did hear about the set up difficulties...
  - toto444 5y ago
    I thought it was all about easing container deployment and orchestration (not that I know anything about it).
  - sodality2 5y ago
    resilience to dropping servers is one. (sort of hand-in-hand with auto-scaling, both imply dynamic sizing of server pool)
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I can only guess that small sites frequently experiencing the hug of death when they get #1 on HN leads some people to believe you need some insane setup, when in reality it's more like this case: it works just fine on a smallish setup as soon as you remember to enable caching.
cblconfederate 5y ago
it usually amazes me to see sites going down because of HN traffic because it is really not that much, in fact barely noticeable in a 10-year old server.

beznet 5y ago

If this post gets #1 I expect to see results titled "Results from being #1 on HN about being #1 on HN"

plondon514 5y ago
Ask and ye shall receive

mettamage 5y ago

Fascinating. I thought that HN was more like a 100K community (of monthly active users). I guess my ballpark is correct? I now think it's slightly less.

drclau 5y ago
You know what would be nice? HN stats! Active users (daily, monthly, etc.), how many posts a user checks on avg., how many comments per user, how many submissions per user, top commenters, top etc. etc. etc., breakdown per OS more etc. etc. etc. :) @HN, what do you think?
Lapsa 5y ago
I don't click on every #1 link.
furyofantares 5y ago
I probably click the #1 link less than 10% of the time and idunno there's only like a 1 in 3 chance I check HN when any given story is on the front page, so from their 29k views now I'm thinking HN is 1M active users. Which of us is way off?
wongarsu 5y ago
Some guestimating: I clicked on 3 of the current top 10 posts, so if that's a representative click-through rate then that would put the HN community at ~100k daily active users (which probably means more like 1M monthly). That's assuming the post stayed in the top 10 for 24 hours, or at least long enough for visitors from every time zone to notice it.
onion2k 5y ago
A 6 hour window is less than 1% of a month. If you think HN has 100K MAUs then you should expect way less than 28,000 people to hit HN during that 6 hour window to see the link in the #1 spot. Even if the article was on the front page for a full day you wouldn't expect 28,000 clicks because fewer than that would be hitting HN on that particular day. Traffic isn't distributed linearly across the month but still. Even then, I don't think this is a representative snapshot of HN users anyway. The average time on the site was 37 seconds. That's enough to work out what it's about and decide it's not interesting (to that person). As Codeamigo is a coding school, and HN has a lot of users who can already code, that's not surprising. It's likely that far more people read the comments first and didn't bother clicking after understanding what it is. More importantly than all of that though, is that the link wasn't about Codeamigo. It was about starting it after being rejected by Codacademy. The interesting part of the narrative was about coming back from rejection, not the product itself. The fact 28,000 people clicked at all is amazing.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I was #1 for a few hours a year ago, from last St. Paddy’s Day. It was a nice ego boost, but it only lasted for a day or so, and then it was back to being a regular schlub. Anyone interested in a secondhand cape? I never even got a chance to wear it.

brightball 5y ago
I've done it a few times, which shocked me. Each time it meant about 20-40k unique views and some solid discussion. That's honestly my favorite thing when it happens, seeing something I wrote about discussed in depth on here by people who know what they are talking about. The only real lasting benefit was a steady stream of traffic to those articles years later. Reality Driven Development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154355 Comparing Elixir and Go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497505 Docker is the Heroku Killer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371249 No Such Thing as "Real" Programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045526

cblconfederate 5y ago

i ve had posts in the frontpage in the past. It's not worth it for the community, it is negative and stuck in a groupthink. It usually contributes zero or less than that. Still, you get a lot of link juice because a lot of other sites copy the link.

plondon514 5y ago
It's been a pretty positive experience for Codeamigo. People have been reaching out to help out, submit bug reports, and suggest interesting features.

jeswin 5y ago

Can you post OS stats as well please, if you have them? From my own posts which made it to the front-page, I remember that non-mobile users were predominantly on Macs, with Linux far behind and Windows being tiny. I don't remember the exact numbers though; and I'd also love to hear the Android/iOS breakup.

plondon514 5y ago
Operating system Visitors iOS 8k (28%) Mac 7.9k (28%) Android 7.2k (26%) Windows 3.5k (13%) GNU/Linux 897 (3%) Ubuntu 376 (1%) Chrome OS 94 (0%) Fedora 68 (0%) FreeBSD 4 (0%)
- jeswin 5y ago
  Thank you.

conradfr 5y ago

Do the raw numbers take into account adblockers?

plondon514 5y ago
Hmm good point (it does not). Codeamigo uses Plausible, which is blocked by adblockers.

jeffwass 5y ago

I once linked a video on my YouTube channel in a comment which was a reply to the top comment on a thread. My YouTube channel gets hardly any views, but that one day I got perhaps 100-200 hundred views. But the knock-on effect was great (although small), YT finally started recommending my video to others, and I was averaging between 1-3 views a day. It’s tapered off now to a handful of views a week.

shantnutiwari 5y ago

I reached the front page of HN too (though not #1). My rough stats were: 20-30,000 new visitors Most were from USA, with europe and India, China behind. Mobile users were 70-80% I've been on top of HN and Reddit programming before as well. Though you get a boost, the traffic isnt very sticky. From those 30,000 visitors, I got maybe 20-30 email signups. And the traffic dropped in 1-2 days. But there are long term benefits, as the link was then shared by other people on Linkedin, Chinese new sites etc, leading to indirectly new visitors over time.

tmaly 5y ago

I can't tell, is that bounce rate mentioned in the article good or bad?

leerob 5y ago

> Investigating the Vercel response headers, we can see that the X-Vercel-Cache Header is 'MISS' Lee from Vercel here. SSR + caching is extremely powerful, but it's more difficult to get right :) We're working on providing more tools to help developers understand if they're not adding the correct caching headers, but in the meantime, tools like Incremental Static Regeneration help you have a static output while still having dynamic data. It's not a perfect use case for everything, but it might be something to consider. Regardless, glad you got the caching headers correct - let me know if you have any other questions or feedback!

georgewsinger 5y ago

Possibly useful data for other startups: SimulaVR (https://www.simulavr.com https://www.simulavr.com) made the front page a few weeks ago. This led to ~2.5K new signups for our Linux VR headset waitlist.

perelin 5y ago

Interesting! I only consume HN via RSS feed. That means: chronological order + I have no idea what is #1 at any given time. Always wonder why some posts get tons of comments and others almost none at all. Micro echo chamber? Does the time of posting affect the impact? I wonder how many people have the same experience.