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Dates covered: 2007-2-20 -- 2023-5-25

Total stories: 178,072 (Should match 5,939 days * 30 stories, seems to come a bit short with 98 fewer stories than expected.)

- States mentioned: 50 (mentions: 1,344)

- Cities mentioned: 109 (checked against list of 330 largest US cities, plus a few additions of my own).

- Sites submitted: 52,687

Top 20 states by raw string-match (this is adjusted below for some overstatements):

   1.  new york:         316
   2.  california:       308
   3.  texas:             98
   4.  washington:        73
   5.  colorado:          38
   6.  florida:           38
   7.  arizona:           28
   8.  georgia:           24
   9.  utah:              24
  10.  kansas:            23
  11.  virginia:          23
  12.  oregon:            22
  13.  michigan:          19
  14.  minnesota:         16
  15.  north carolina:    16
  16.  ohio:              16
  17.  alaska:            15
  18.  indiana:           15
  19.  hawaii:            14
  20.  maine:             14
Confounding factors include other terminology, other name matches:

"New York" frequently appears in reference to newspapers or cities:

  new york times:            98
  new york city:             55
So adjusted NY score: 163

"Washington" is even harder to disambiguate, as it may refer to the state, city (DC), as a topnym for the US / US Government, etc., It's challenging to identify these textually, though the newspaper and monument mentions can be identified:

  washington post:           16
  washington times:           1
  washington monument:        1
Adjusted WA score: 55. And is probably lower.

California is often mentioned by toponym (e.g., "silicon valley", region (bay area), or specific cities (SF, LA, etc.). I'm NOT going to adjust for these but do note the following major occurences:

  silicon valley:           399
  bay area:                  65
  california ave:             2
There are a few other more minor examples such as "kansas city" (confounding "kansas"), "oklahoma city", and "iowa city", though those don't affect top results.

Adjusted top-5 state rankings:

  1.  california:       308
  2.  new york:         163
  3.  texas:             98
  4.  washington:        55
  5.  colorado:          38
So, answering the original question, Colorado is the fifth-most-loved front-page state.

The 10 least-represented states:

  41.  new mexico:         6
  42.  alabama:            5
  43.  idaho:              5
  44.  north dakota:       5
  45.  connecticut:        4
  46.  nebraska:           4
  47.  new hampshire:      4
  48.  rhode island:       3
  49.  south dakota:       3
  50.  south carolina:     1
Top-10 US city-name mentions (see confounding factors above):

   1. new york:         316
   2. san francisco:    192
   3. boston:           117
   4. seattle:           87
   5. hollywood:         76
   5. tempe:             69
   6. berkeley:          63
   7. chicago:           62
   8. cambridge:         50
   9. detroit:           41
  10. los angeles:       30
(This excludes the NYC burough of Manhattan, which gets 36 mentions itself, nudging out LA.)

I've also got a list of most-featured front-page sites, with the ten most frequent being: nytimes.com, techcrunch.com, arstechnica.com, bloomberg.com, wired.com, wsj.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.org, BBC (as both bbc.com and bbc.co.uk), and theguardian.com. The mean votes and comments for each are interesting, with Bloomberg topping by both average vote (255.46) and comments (178.04), from the top-10. (There are obviously sites with much higher mean scores but less frequent appearance, including singletons).

I've broken submitters by freqency, points, and comments as well, with 43,745 submitters accounting for the stories analised. The long-absent nickb tops front-page appearances at 1,322, followed by ingve (1,177) and tosh (679). I've apparently landed 60 front-page submissions averaging 329.00 points and 147.52 comments (both fairly respectable --- I'm apparently not submitting total tosh).

I'm still updating my code and checking data (and found a couple of glitches writing out the above, e.g., whatever I'd done to tabulate city mentions didn't work). Data exist presently in flatfiles, I'm thinking of dumping to sqlite for possibly easier/faster analysis.

A rough and preliminary look at countries represented in front-page titles, again with numerous issues:

   1.  US:  1350
   2.  U.S.:  1073
   3.  China:  634
   4.  Japan:  526
   5.  India:  477
   6.  UK:  288
   7.  EU:  225
   8.  Russia:  221
   9.  Germany:  165
  10.  Canada:  162
  11.  Australia:  157
  12.  Korea:  140
  13.  France:  116
  14.  Iran:  91
  15.  Dutch:  80
  16.  United States:  75
  17.  Brazil:  69
  18.  North Korea:  69
  19.  Sweden:  68
  20.  Cuba:  67
  21.  Egypt:  60
  22.  Norway:  60
  23.  USA:  59
  24.  E.U.:  54
  25.  Israel:  53
  26.  Iceland:  52
  27.  New Zealand:  47
  28.  Mexico:  45
  29.  Spain:  43
  30.  Finland:  39
  31.  Italy:  38
  32.  South Korea:  38
  33.  Switzerland:  38
  34.  Singapore:  36
  35.  Mali:  35
  36.  Chile:  33
  37.  Turkey:  33
  38.  Argentina:  27
  39.  Netherlands:  25
  40.  Syria:  25
"Cuba" often appears as "Mark Cuban", Jordan is the country most often confounded with a major celebrity and/or IT/tech personality ("Michael Jordan" and "Jordan Hubard" respectively), "Mali" is most likely to be confused with a car or AMD chipset, the United States has multiple possible references (US, U.S., USA, U.S.A., America, American), some of which are confounded (e.g., "North America"). But this provides a rough sense.

Analysis is largely awk, grep, sort, uniq --- standard shell tool stuff. Amazingly powerful though really. Crawl via wget which performed wonderfully as usual. Thanks to HN/YC for not throttling too aggressively.



One question answered: there are in fact not 30 stories per summary, consistently.

  5923 30
     3 26
     3 27
     3 28
     2 29
     1 0
     1 17
     1 19
     1 20
     1 25
Which occur on the following dates:

  2007-03-10:  29
  2007-03-24:  26
  2007-03-25:  25
  2007-05-19:  27
  2007-05-26:  26
  2007-05-28:  29
  2007-06-02:  19
  2007-06-16:  28
  2007-06-23:  17
  2007-06-24:  28
  2007-06-30:  20
  2007-07-01:  28
  2007-07-07:  27
  2007-07-15:  26
  2007-07-28:  27
  2014-01-06:  0
The 2014 instance was a site outage, discussed here: <https://hackertimes.com/item?id=7015129>

Spot checks suggest the others were in fact days with fewer-than-normal stories, e.g., <https://hackertimes.com/front?day=2007-06-30>


I'd long wondered about the day-of-week effect on HN. Turns out that yes, there is one.

Looking at just 2022 (most recent full-year data:

2022:

  DoW           Stories  Points (   mean )  Comments (   mean )
  Monday        1560     481368 ( 308.57 )    288928 ( 185.21 )
  Tuesday       1560     528265 ( 338.63 )    309799 ( 198.59 )
  Wednesday     1560     506977 ( 324.99 )    310698 ( 199.17 )
  Thursday      1560     514046 ( 329.52 )    320883 ( 205.69 )
  Friday        1560     465283 ( 298.26 )    287805 ( 184.49 )
  Saturday      1590     401207 ( 252.33 )    228966 ( 144.00 )
  Sunday        1560     410879 ( 263.38 )    239186 ( 153.32 )
Tuesday and Wednesday typically see most engagement. Biggest fall-off is Saturday.

On the other hand, if you want a chance of your submission making the front page, weekends are probably a better bet. (My data don't show this, mind, as they don't show all submissions for a day, but this tends to support my hunch / general sense in my own submissions.)

It's interesting to note that Tuesday and Wednesday have generally captured the top spot, but there was a notable fall-off in Wednesday's standing in the Covid era. Not entirely unprecedented (Wed. lagged Tues. by 10 votes (points) in 2014, for example), but it catches my eye.

There's also the long-term trends in votes and comments over the years:

  Year  Stories     Points (  mean )   Comments (  mean )
  2007     9382      92264 (   9.83 )     61207 (   6.52 )
  2008    10980     294775 (  26.85 )    186339 (  16.97 )
  2009    10950     608603 (  55.58 )    303962 (  27.76 )
  2010    10950    1062763 (  97.06 )    491718 (  44.91 )
  2011    10949    1657004 ( 151.34 )    632724 (  57.79 )
  2012    10980    1829402 ( 166.61 )    778634 (  70.91 )
  2013    10950    2132819 ( 194.78 )    998387 (  91.18 )
  2014    10905    2057628 ( 188.69 )    916438 (  84.04 )
  2015    10950    2001269 ( 182.76 )    845719 (  77.23 )
  2016    10977    2521394 ( 229.70 )   1137575 ( 103.63 )
  2017    10950    2776064 ( 253.52 )   1259899 ( 115.06 )
  2018    10950    2762928 ( 252.32 )   1262654 ( 115.31 )
  2019    10950    3051011 ( 278.63 )   1447141 ( 132.16 )
  2020    10980    3338150 ( 304.02 )   1734703 ( 157.99 )
  2021    10950    3376829 ( 308.39 )   1859933 ( 169.86 )
  2022    10950    3308025 ( 302.10 )   1986265 ( 181.39 )
  2023     4350    1309865 ( 301.12 )    737425 ( 169.52 )




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