Item 10^6

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000000

by pg • 17 years ago

107 45 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

sama• 17 years ago

sadly i did not have time to test my script and there was a bug or i would have for sure had it :(

mixmax• 17 years ago

You can take solace in the fact that you just had your 1K karma day :-)

steve___• 17 years ago

At least the comment was original.

kogir• 17 years ago

I was secretly hoping pg would hack things so that 10^6 was just skipped ;)

pg3• 17 years ago

I considered it, but item ids are so deep in the code that it would have been asking for trouble.

zachbeane3• 17 years ago

A one-line change to new-item-id is asking for trouble?

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Now we look to the 2^20 day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048576

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

Still a loooooong way to go... but the item IDs aren't limited to 32 bit ints are they? ;)

krallja• 17 years ago

Are you kidding? HN is written in Arc, not C++.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

Once you start looking for "interesting" ids you can find all sorts of reasons to find them. 2^20, the next prime, Fibonacci numbers, etc.

Perhaps for any given point in a increasing number series there is an infinite number of interesting numbers just around the corner.

Sigh.

It's the sieve of Giraffes

ars• 17 years ago

> It's the sieve of Giraffes

Or the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

Every number is interesting somehow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number - and the quote: "Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood, upon hearing of the taxicab incident.

andrewpbrett• 17 years ago

I've never heard "sieve of giraffes" before, and I'm coming up empty in searches for it. Can you explain?

Raphael• 17 years ago

1000000 GET

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Can you estimate how quickly 2e6 will occur at the current growth rate? I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in 2010.

teuobk• 17 years ago

Based on fitting a simple logarithmic curve, plus some fiddling, I'm thinking 2e6 will happen in late September, 2010.

henning• 17 years ago

Thanks for building this site, Paul.

davi5• 17 years ago

OK, while we're on the topic of useless numerology:

How old are you in HN years? (ID of your most recent post / ID of your first post)

me: 1000140 / 174632 = 5.7 HN years

edw519 (current leader after pg): 999538 / 9357 = 107 HNyears

RIP, nickb: 685017 / 2649 = 259 HNyears

mechanical_fish: 999416 / 22714 = 44 HNyears

kurtosis• 17 years ago

is there somewhere else where this convention is used?

if the Id of the most recent post is an exponentially growing function of time then the time between any two posts should be proportional to the log of the ratio of their IDs.. so

shouldn't it be log(ID most recent / ID first post) ?

davi5• 17 years ago

I made it up.

But for exponentially growing ID, log(ID most recent / ID first post) is proportional to age of account & that's boring -- the nonlinearity is what makes the measure 'fun' (I use the term loosely). It agrees with some notion of the 'good old days' when Startup News was a fishbowl we could all look in on, and early HN participants were Founders not only of startups but also an online community.

I agree though, there are probably more interesting measures one could come up with.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

me: 998366 / 243 = 4108 HN years

There may be earlier ones - I couldn't retrieve comments before about Jun 2007, so I went by my earliest submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243

davi5• 17 years ago

I used searchyc to get earliest comment ids.

colbyolson• 17 years ago

When was it confirmed that nickb had passed?

davi5• 17 years ago

I was referring to the account, not the person. Sorry for the ambiguity.

rms• 17 years ago

Only some trolls think Nickb is dead. The best solid evidence for him not being dead is that even if he doesn't answer his cell phone, he seems to be paying the bill. Though I suppose that's not very good evidence with automatic payment being so common.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

20 years old again! Woo hoo!

dfranke• 17 years ago

1000225/1809 = 552.91

zitterbewegung• 17 years ago

3.7 HN years. Probably after this post a little bit more.

endlessvoid94• 17 years ago

997143 / 600 = 1 661.905

bootload• 17 years ago

"... How old are you in HN years? (ID of your most recent post / ID of your first post) ..."

999899/425 = 2352 HNY

latest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=999899 first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425

vaksel2• 17 years ago

would have been nicer if the post was a little bit more programming related.

Since it's somewhat an anniversary, can you tell us what kind of traffic HN is getting? users wise, pageviews wise. Or is that a trade secret?

pg3• 17 years ago

We now get around 40k unique ips and 500k pageviews on week days. Here's the traffic as of last night:

http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-16dec09.png

The reason pageviews peaked in Aug is that we got better then at shutting down over-aggressive crawlers. The big spike in uniques was when the HN thread about _why became the de facto condolence page for the whole web.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

those numbers are pretty good, although the ratio is lower than I expected. 12 page views per user, per month? I view more than that while I eat my breakfast.

whyme• 17 years ago

Congrats on the growth. I think you're going through some growth technology problems as well?. I find the responsiveness of HN has changed for the worse. I notice the main page doesn't respond sometimes and trying to check out the submissions for top leaders / heavy users yields no results. Just an observation.

zachbeane3• 17 years ago

You can't use item numbers as an index of activity.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87846

Item 10^6

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