4 Years of HN Traffic

http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-5mar12.png

by pg • 14 years ago

150 29 14 years ago

yemkay• 14 years ago

Thrilled to know, this world has 150K hackers

mbel• 14 years ago

I'd rather say it's far less than that. Remember that single reader can access hn via multiple devices and access points, so unique IP count doesn't really feel representative.

patrickk• 14 years ago

Yes, good point - I'm guessing many people would access HN from both home and work, to name just one scenario.

benjaminwootton• 14 years ago

You do realise it's 1.5 million on the Y axis!?

dkasper• 14 years ago

That's page views, not users. ;-)

tomedme• 14 years ago

Interesting weekly patterns.

I'd also be curious to match up the spikes of traffic with significant news (01/2012 3rd week, 12/2011 2nd week, etc).

Thanks for sharing!

slyall• 14 years ago

Using http://hhn.domador.net to look at previous pages I would guess that.

3rd week of Jan 2012 ( http://hhn.domador.net/2012/01/18/23/ ) was all the SOPA/PIPA news.

2nd week of Dec was less obvious. I am guessing a major site linked to HN but scanning through the stories I am not sure exactly which one it would be for.

cobychapple• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting! Nothing like steady, consistent growth.

It would be interesting to overlay prominent events (e.g. the passing of Steve Jobs and so forth) on this to see if/how the spikes correspond.

joshAg• 14 years ago

any chance of releasing the data behind the two graphs? i'd love to see these on a log scale or with percent growth.

cdvonstinkpot• 14 years ago

I seem to recall there used to be a 'Mixpanel' logo at the footer of the page. Is HN still using them, & is that where these graphs came from?

asciident• 14 years ago

These graphs look like matplotlib charts. I'm assuming pg just dumped the numbers and wrote a 5 line python script to make the chart.

ahsanhilal• 14 years ago

So from pg's profile it seem like HN has been around for almost 5.5 years. I haven't been around HN for that long, but was HN initially private and 4 years ago gave access to public? Would be interested to know.

mixmax• 14 years ago

No, it was public from the start - the ID's are sequential, so you can go back and see what the first submissions were.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={a rather smallish number}

andrewhillman• 14 years ago

I am curious to know what that huge spike in Dec was.

philco• 14 years ago

SOPA + Reddit blackout I think?

i_cannot_hack• 14 years ago

The SOPA blackout was on January 18, more than a month after the traffic spike.

tom6a• 14 years ago

MSM links create traffic spikes. There is a (somewhat small) spike in August that pg attributed to a PC World article. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865985 and the article here http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...

Perhaps the Dec spike is from the Inquirer article which links to HN. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2130668/facebook-pr...

hinathan• 14 years ago

Thanks for the data! Playing with OCR engines lately has gotten me into the habit of wanting to turn static bitmaps into searchable and transformable data. I haven't taken a crack at graphs yet but it looks like things like http://plotdigitizer.sourceforge.net/ might be up for it.

leeskye• 14 years ago

Would be cool to see this graph with a column chart.

zackattack• 14 years ago

Can WA parse this image into a function of time?

instakill• 14 years ago

Looking at the graphs, HN really isn't a weekend platform.

chmike• 14 years ago

We shouldn't submit new entries on week-end or at end december. But this would amplify the oscillations.

willvarfar2• 14 years ago

Somewhat tangentially related: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...

My own numbers from just a few months of sampling

What the heck: here it is on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3670178

msutherl• 14 years ago

Strange, I coincidentally dreamt about pg having posted stats today. I didn't bother to look assuming he would never do that.

notatoad• 14 years ago

i'm pretty sure that's the most linear and predictable traffic graph i've ever seen.

willvarfar2• 14 years ago

You predicted the steady growth of HN?

tintin• 14 years ago

And still using one server? One thing I learned from PG is to first look at your code before upgrading the hardware.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

I asked pg in Oct 2011:

"One server. An Intel Xeon E5450 with 12 GB RAM." [1]

That's pretty damn impressive.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3079442

nraynaud• 14 years ago

Where's the hockey stick ?

4 Years of HN Traffic

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