For these numbers to make any sense at all, you need to scrape the new posts. Now you can only tell what you measured: How many how/why stories were submitted.

For these numbers to make any sense at all, you need to scrape the new posts. Now you can only tell what you measured: How many how/why stories were submitted. By scraping the new posts and count the ones that make it to the homepage, you can tell which HN users prefer, if HN users prefer how/why stories versus other stories, and how many how-stories versus how many why-stories are submitted (probably closer to how many are on the web, so you might get an impression of that too). The current numbers are meaningless data, not information. Oh and you might as well track 'show HN' and 'ask HN', or just create a wordcloud. THEN we have really useful info!