HN now serving a million page views on weekdays

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#9feb11

by pg • 15 years ago

279 80 15 years ago

_b8r0• 15 years ago

I'd congratulate you but I'm not sure if that's the right thing. It is hopeful to see that the quality isn't significantly affected though.

catshirt2• 15 years ago

a million pageviews isn't cool. you know what's cool? a billion pageviews

edit: can't help but presume my intention was lost on the downvoters. not all jokes are purposeless.

rewind• 15 years ago

A million page views isn't cool. You know what's cool? New material ;-)

AgentConundrum2• 15 years ago

reddit apparently did a billion pageviews last month. I'd rather HN not turn into reddit.

While there are still some intellectual safe havens on reddit, the majority of the site is now dick jokes and pun threads. Not that reddit doesn't still contribute informative comments, just that the signal-to-noise ratio has definitely shifted over the years.

HN, by contrast, tends to be intellectual by default, with the odd tasteful joke or pun thrown in for good measure where appropriate.

I really like this place, and I'd hate for it to become ruined by an excess of new users.

(and yes, I know you were just making a TSN joke)

jacoblyles• 15 years ago

Movie quotes have replaced puns as the lowest form of wit. Yes, we get it. You're quoting a movie. Congratulations.

Jsarokin2• 15 years ago

Hopefully with the amount of hits and new users the site is getting, quality doesn't decline. HN has (In a matter of 4 days) taken the #1 spot on my "TechNews" bookmark folder, so as of now the article quality is great.

As a new user, I'm quite surprised with how civil and helpful everyone is.

Often times when you put a lot of extremely intelligent and strong-minded people in the same place, things can get heated really quickly. Granted, strong-minded people are usually not offended easily.

misterbwong• 15 years ago

Congrats to the yc crew. It's no easy task to cultivate a community while keeping quality high.

As a side note, does anyone know what kind of hardware setup they are using to serve up HN?

barrkel3• 15 years ago

> Judging from the classic view, the stories on the frontpage are not much different from those we'd have had in the first year

I'll repeat (the gist of) my comment in a less crowded context (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157384):

First-year users will only vote on what they see, and if they don't consistently use the classic view - which I expect very few would - then they will most likely only vote on what everyone else has voted on. Thus, classic wouldn't be expected to be significantly different from the regular home page, and thus it cannot measure any decline.

pg7• 15 years ago

thus it cannot measure any decline

That's not true unless those users are somehow compelled to upvote a constant number of stories, which they're not. I upvote a smaller proportion of stories on the frontpage than I used to.

barrkel3• 15 years ago

I almost never vote on anything that's not already on the front page; mind you, I seldom vote up more than two or three stories per day.

Assuming that the number of first-year users' votes is noise compared to votes from newer users, and that first-year users vote mostly on items on the front page, then looking their votes alone should just give a different sort order to that front page. That's my intuition, without taking into account ranking algorithms using quadratic decay etc., but I'm not sure there's a good reason to think that would change things.

staunch• 15 years ago

HN became my favorite site when it launched, it's my favorite site now, and I expect it will be my favorite site four years from now.

Thanks for keeping it good.

pmjordan• 15 years ago

Nomen est omen? :-)

macov• 15 years ago

Aren't we supposed to work hard, LOL?

acconrad• 15 years ago

What I never understand about the "more exposure will dilute our membership quality" is that it's a social voting site. If you're going to share something with a community that has open registration, and gets exposure by sharing links to other networks (such as Digg and Reddit), this sort of thing is inevitable. I'm glad it's received the exposure it has because it's become such a great content generator. I don't really see the harm in this growth.

qeorge• 15 years ago

More voters means closer to average. It has to.

Quirky communities with strong personalities are more interesting.

(I'm still quite happy with HN though :)

marknutter• 15 years ago

The beginning of the end.

edw519• 15 years ago

As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand unique visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays.

Funny, before jacquesm retired from hn last week: 90,001 unique visitors and 2 million page views per day.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for...

(just kidding - we miss you, jacquesm. ping us sometime)

enko• 15 years ago

Let's have a break from the incestuous cross-pollination on HN please.

Frankly if HN had an option to ignore all posts from the top 10 leaderboard I would opt in to that; I am sick and tired of this entirely irrelevant person-specific drama.

lionhearted• 15 years ago

Congratulations and much gratitude to you Paul, all of the YC team, and all of the editors for tireless and thankless work to keep things running well.

> As we approach HN's fourth birthday, traffic is now around 90 thousand unique visitors and 1 million page views on weekdays. (Http requests and page views are identical except for votes, of which there are about 25 thousand on a weekday.)

Interesting, interesting... btw, one set of stats I was curious on - got any numbers on how many people who browse are registered and what percent of registered users vote? I'd be fascinated to hear about it if the numbers are handy and not confidential.

Thanks again and congrats on news.yc and all the recent cool developments and successes at incubating.

webwright2• 15 years ago

I know this is a contentious question, but have you ever considered turning HN into a business with YC as the primary investor? The question is: could you advance it as a business without killing the magic and the splash benefit to Y Combinator. I think the answer to both is yes.

alexophile• 15 years ago

In many ways, I think that's already what it is. HN was created to, and still does, serve the purposes of YC. I don't know where the money comes from to keep it up and running, but I would imagine it's part of the YC operating budget.

In short, I'm sure the value it represents now is far greater than what one could garner from trying to directly monetize it. Just look at any of pgs posts - people upvote the bejeezus out of them: he can instantly and effortlessly access thousands of high quality eyeballs.

There are surely people that would pay egregious sums of money to have this kind of community in any vertical, and tech startups are pretty hot - I struggle to even fathom what could possibly constitute a fair price for jeopardizing that.

[edit: Google says it's spelled 'bejeezus']

jackowayed• 15 years ago

It's also amazing leadgen for YC. That's partially because of PG's direct ability to get things like "apps are open" to the top spot, but also just because if you use HN regularly, you get a good impression of YC and are constantly reminded that it exists.

webwright2• 15 years ago

I agree HN is super-valuable for YC right now. But it's effectively part-time product of a pretty small team. Could a small full-time team do good things in terms of user joy, loyalty, acquisition, and even monetization? With PG as an advisor/owner, I can't imagine why not.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

I suspect HN is a fantastic ambient resource for actual Y Combinator members. That is to say, I suspect most of them would have a harder time being productive and successful in a world without HN.

pg7• 15 years ago

I haven't thought about it. We don't need or want to. But you probably could if you wanted to.

Kaizyn• 15 years ago

The only possible way it could be done is if they start charging a subscription for the service. Anything else would pretty much kill it, and adding a subscription probably would too.

rottencupcakes• 15 years ago

That's jumping to conclusions. I bet tons of marketers would pay mad money for their job postings and other things to be seen by all the high quality eyeballs on hacker news.

orky56• 15 years ago

HN would be in the same space as Reddit at that point. Reddit seems to be doing well with YC's help. The audiences are different and clearly as we have seen there is enough space for the both of them. There is something about HN being what it is today without the motive of creating profits. The content and community is what drives traffic and I hope that's how it will always be.

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

Thank you, Paul for running an amazing site. I think I get a lot of value out of it. I hope YComibnator does, too.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

pg, please consider including the year in the dates on the news page.

nicholasjbs• 15 years ago

As a stopgap fix, the anchor links for the news items include the year. Obviously not ideal, but useful if you're really curious or confused about one of them.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

A million! Imagine how much bandwidth HN could save if each comment didn't use nested font tags and inline styles ;)

seiji• 15 years ago

Or gzip for that matter. :)

gzipping this thread page results in a 5x size decrease.

Can't blame pg though. He's just a product of his computational adolescence. In another 15 years, we'll still be using CSS and divs while the kids move on to 3D direct brain interface temporal markup languages.

ElbertF• 15 years ago

Or tables with spacer images. What is this, 1995?

pg7• 15 years ago

How much bandwidth would that save?

gduffy• 15 years ago

I'd guess anywhere from 100GB to 1TB every month depending on whether you did the inline style suggestion and/or the gzip suggestion.

This page gzip'd: http://www.google.com/search?q=30+*+1e6+*+(52KB-10KB)

Front page gzip'd: http://www.google.com/search?q=30+*+1e6+*+(25KB-5KB)

So probably not worth it :)

pbhjpbhj4• 15 years ago

ZOMG!

I'm actually really surprised by this .. does anyone know the rationale/reason for such poor markup and lack of optimisation?

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

> Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html

flyosity• 15 years ago

Wow, I never peeked at the HN HTML source before but it's pretty terrible. Tables nested within tables, tables used for layout and non-tabular data, CSS only used for colors and fonts. It's such a simple layout that I can't believe they didn't go all-CSS for it and make the HTML really semantic and tight.

maeon3• 15 years ago

When HN goes to 10 million page views, HN will no longer be HN. It will be another digg.

coderdude4• 15 years ago

I don't know why people are down-voting you. Some people might not like it, but you simply cannot maintain the quality this site has enjoyed over the past several years as we continue to take on a mess of new users. Most of the new users simply don't fall into the hacker/entrepreneur category (as past polls have clearly indicated). They're just people coming from Reddit or wherever who want a "better" experience. Most of the articles on the 'newest' page are about crap like WebOS and #superbowl and politics and you name it. HN will in fact go the way of all previous communities as it takes on hoards of people who don't care about the original intent of this site.

antirez10• 15 years ago

I think that PG will be able to take the quality as high as today, for a very simple reason, he does not reason in terms of pageviews for this site, and will be willing to do all the needed changes, even if this will upset the "wrong" part of the user base, to take quality high. So at max the new rules will have the effect of reducing again the user base to the original one. Otherwise if this does not happen, there will be a next HN site somewhere and we'll switch again. slashdot -> programming.reddit.com -> HN -> ?

antirez10• 15 years ago

This would imply that when dig had 1 million page views was like HN, that is not the case. So I think your claim is flawed ;)

coderdude4• 15 years ago

Digg used to be a great place for programming-related news. It was the place for a good programming news when it came out. Why? Because its community was populated by programmers. Over the years the programming section on Digg became desolate and ignored as the programmers sought refuge from the lolcats and poor discussion. A similar thing is happening to Reddit as people want to move somewhere that isn't dominated by discussion comprised of witty comments and mostly high-level tech news.

rudiger• 15 years ago

What are your plans for monetization? Advertising to such a targeted audience could be very lucrative, and I'm sure lots of startups would be interested in advertising here! Currently, all we have is "organic" advertisement through interesting submissions and comments. What kind of revenue could one expect from 90K unique visitors and 1M page views on weekdays with an audience like HN's?

antirez10• 15 years ago

HN is an advertising site in some way, both for YC startups and even for all its users that have something good to propose. For instance Redis started to get some user base thanks to HN.

antirez10• 15 years ago

HN is my favorite site, what a wonderful community. PG: thank you for putting it together.

However, the site is not fast, seriously, a site that's so simple containing just a few text should be blazingly fast. It does not take too much science to reach this goal.

I understand that it can be interesting running it via an Arc program, but you hit millions of page views, and there are people that are using this site every day to get together, to share their knowledge, and so forth, and it's a shame that there is to wait too much at every page view.

pmarin• 15 years ago

The problem is more Racket than Arc. By the way I feel Reddit more slower and with worse uptime than HN.

antirez10• 15 years ago

Reddit serves an order (or two?) of magnitude more traffic, and the fact another site is slow does not make HN faster ;)

Btw I've no precise idea about the software stack HN use, I'm just proposing a quality change, that is faster, the mean it is achieved is another (very interesting) topic.

pg7• 15 years ago

Do you mean it's slow now, or that it was slow a week ago? It doesn't seem slow to me now.

antirez10• 15 years ago

It is no longer too slow, but still not as fast as it could be. I must admit, my experience is filtered by the fact that I'm in Italy and I guess there are many hops between me and the HN servers, but still loading pages seems to take something in the order of one second.

Being the layout very simple to render, no graphics, there are all the prerequisites to make the HN experience "google alike" from the point of view of latency.

da5e• 15 years ago

" the stories on the frontpage are not much different from those we'd have had in the first year."

This is the real story. I noticed that about 4 months ago the nature of Hacker News seemed to veer out of its original emphasis and now it's back to what it used to be.

dpcan• 15 years ago

I have just one thing to say:

Please do not change the site.

Sincerely.

pbhjpbhj4• 15 years ago

What, not even removing the superfluous font tags?

pg7• 15 years ago

Our research indicates most users read the site as rendered by a browser, rather than by reading the html source.

axiom• 15 years ago

Regarding the classic view, isn't there a bit of bias there? since people mostly only look at the front page, then the stories they vote up are chosen from ones already on the front page. So comparing what the front page would look like if only votes from old accounts counted doesn't say much since in all likelihood you'd see the same stories.

Maybe a better metric would be to track only the first few votes that stories get to see if the same ones would make it to the front page?

someperson• 15 years ago

PG, I think you should write the year when you write a "news news" post.

This site has been around for long enough that certain older posts on that page have some ambiguity.

js4all• 15 years ago

> 1 million page views on weekdays

That's impressive. Congrats.

So why is it still PR6 ? I guess the 136 Errors and 6 warning(s) from the HTML Validator give a big penalty.

HN now serving a million page views on weekdays

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