Analyzing 10,000 Show HN Submissions

http://antontarasenko.github.io/show-hn/

by anton_tarasenko • 10 years ago

96 14 10 years ago

antontarasenko.github.io

deanclatworthy• 10 years ago

How were you able to use the crunchbase data set without paying their high prices?

anton_tarasenko4• 10 years ago

I had their Excel export file c. 2015, when it was still free.

minimaxir2• 10 years ago

The last export date was 2013, which they still offer: https://data.crunchbase.com/page/pricing

minimaxir2• 10 years ago

A large amount of Show HNs are not startups; they are personal projects.

Relatedly, using "the startup is not dead" as a metric for the startup alive is a bad idea. People do not shut down everything when a Hacker News submission does not get upvotes (especially in the case of Show HN, where many are hosted on GitHub pages and are free to host, although you account for that in the regression).

The regression has a few issues:

It's a classification problem (alive or dead) so OLS doesn't make sense.
Score and Comments are multicolinear and cannot both be in the same model.
You don't answer or give statistics toward "how well" the model predicts.
Related to the comment earlier, you don't comment on the magnitude of the on_GitHub coefficients, which are huge and skew the entire result of the regression!

While I always appreciate analyses of HN data, the conclusions raise more questions than answers.

anton_tarasenko4• 10 years ago

0. I measure Show HN projects, some of which are startups. The dead/alive status as success is a proper measure for survival. For success, see the section on commercial success.

1. OLS works fine in classification problems. And it has advantages. For example, see http://chrisblattman.com/2015/07/22/statistician-neal-beck-j...

And I purposefully included results from three models, not one. They all say the same thing.

2. Multicollinearity refers to perfect multicollinearity. Having correlated independent variables (as in score and comments) are okay. See http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/86269/what-is-the-e...

3. I mention R² as one measure of predictive power.

4. The regressions without GitHub-hosted projects return same results.

christopheraden• 10 years ago

A couple questions.

OLS works fine in classification problems. And it has advantages.

Do you have more explanation of these advantages? I read through the link you sent, and a bit more about linear probability models. Such things were never discussed in my statistics curriculum (BS, MS, PhD), except for motivating why logistic regression was necessary. I'm not sure I understand the economist's arguments in favor of LPM. Both the interpretation and the distribution of the test statistics will be totally different with OLS versus Logistic Regression, and the overall probability of a defunct project is pretty small ( \hat{P(y=0)} = .07 )--enough where there would be pretty big differences. To be clear, my reservation is with the p-values in the OLS model, not the predictions it generates. While the models agree on the direction of the covariates, the magnitudes are quite different, even when you convert logit/probit to be on the same scale as LPM.

Multicollinearity refers to perfect multicollinearity.

Perfect multicollinearity will definitely mess up the estimation, but even if Score and Comments are not perfectly collinear, it's difficult to talk about each one's effect on the probability individually, as is the interpretation of coefficients in a (logistic) regression. What does the VIFs look like for Score and Comments, in particular?

I mention R² as one measure of predictive power.

But the outcome is binary, so you'll have a similar issue as Minimaxir's first point about OLS. If you wanted to talk about prediction accuracy, what about a confusion matrix, misclassification rate, or specificity/sensitivity/F1? Granted, you'll not want to predict on the same tagged examples that you trained the model on, but maybe you could split it 80-20? Or tag another 20-50? There are also R²-like measures you can use when the dependent variable is binary (a whole class of pseudo-R² measures).

I would be curious to see the relationship between these predictors and the response. It's usually been my experience that linearity is a strong assumption to make, and that I'd expect for something like comments or score that once it reached a certain threshold, there was no extra value added by getting more comments/score. Are the log-score and log-comments linear over their entire support?

timr• 10 years ago

The dataset interpreted my site as dead because it 301 redirected to the SSL connection. This is probably quite common, so take the living/dead stats with a grain of salt.

Dru89• 10 years ago

Came here to say exactly this. Most stats should probably either treat 3XX as "success" or follow the link to figure out what the next location's status is.

anton_tarasenko4• 10 years ago

I've mentioned this issue in section "Comments". If briefly, redirect does not affect statistical results.

maniyamamoto• 10 years ago

Interesting. Thanks for putting this together!

BinaryIdiot• 10 years ago

I'm just happy my msngr.js project is in here; the last two or so posts about "Show HN" analysis left it out and it made me mildly sad.

xando• 10 years ago

This a really great overview.

Not complaining, just a note. Those counts are from different points in time of Hacker News. Which means that a chance to get point grows with userbase. Some extreamly popular thing in 2011 can't compete with something in 2016.

Probably it's hard to guess how many user HN got in those time points. But maybe adding section by year could help a bit.

Anyway, Anton great job.

joeblau• 10 years ago

Heh, I have 3 projects on that list and I'm still running two of the three. One was a flappy bird clone in Swift; the other is a Touch Visualizer for iOS and the third is https://www.gitignore.io. Pretty interesting analytics; it's funny because I'm in the process of migrating the touch visualizer to a Swift project and a new project owner.

Analyzing 10,000 Show HN Submissions

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